back to article Imagination unfurls blueprints to 2017's TV, car dashboard chips: the PowerVR Series 8XE

Imagination – the Brit chip design house whose GPUs power Apple iPhones and iPads – has come up with another graphics processor: the 8XE. This could well be the brains inside your next telly or car dashboard. While Imagination's PowerVR XT blueprints end up in iThings, tablets and other high-end devices, the XE family of GPUs …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If someone had told me that the pinnacle of technology was taping a phone to your face, I wouldn't have bothered going into technology.

    1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

      But...

      you gotta look cool at every opportunity... Oh wait...

      given the Samsung S7 Launch yesterday was all about VR I have to wonder how long it will be before some Rapper/R&B performer wearing a VR headset totals his Lambo/Ferrari/Mclaren while driving with the VR enabled. Gotta look cool at all times...

    2. Christian Berger

      Managers don't see technology as something important for success

      All the big "hype" companies of the last decade and a half have not been successful because of technology, but because of marketing hype. Apple doesn't have any kind of special technological magic. Google has vast data centres, but their basic designs are obvious to LISP programmers.

      Some "tech" companies, like Netflix even outsource their technology to companies like Amazon.

  2. Joerg

    The new PowerVR 8XT will be integrated in the Apple A10 and A10X SoC so they surely had the architecture designs since the beginning and not just a few months ago or now.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Apple owns a chunk of Imagination and works with them to design somewhat customized (in terms of number of cores, shaders, etc.) versions for their SoCs. They only need Imagination to complete the various blocks and interconnection between them. They don't need finished products ready since they aren't using Imagination's finished products any more than they are using ARM designed A57 or A72 cores.

      There have been rumors that Apple is working on their own GPU, but it isn't clear whether all the GPU guys they've hired are working on an Apple designed GPU from scratch, or simply working with Imagination to customize their offerings more towards Apple's needs.

  3. MatsSvensson

    How about inventing putting Displayport connectors on all UHD-screens?

    So that you could easily use them for... oh I don't know.... fucking UHD-content?

    I bet that might sell some?

    Or would that require some future discoveries in quantum-computing and graphene?

  4. Christian Berger

    If the TV market was so brutal?

    Why don't they build "video monitors", essentially TVs without all the tuner and "Smart TV" crap. There's a big market for that as with most manufacturers those parts will get replaced by external versions anyhow.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: If the TV market was so brutal?

      I'm not sure you can sell something you refer to as a TV or television in the US without including a tuner. If you sell it as a "video monitor" the large majority of customers will be confused by it and won't be interested.

      I agree with what you're saying, but it ignores market realities. That wouldn't save much money anyway, the tuner costs very little since almost all the patents have expired, and the smart TV functionality is to try to get people to see the TV as worth more and spend more money on it. The margins on a "video monitor" are bound to be even tinier due to the lower price they'd have to sell them for.

  5. Oengus

    So little content

    "The penetration for 4K TVs is really quite slight, and in the big markets like China, they’re still in 1080p or HD TV scaled up 1080p. It's going to take five years to penetrate 50 per cent of the market, and to do that manufacturers need to deal with the cost. Consumers are unwilling to pay a premium for 4K, and the TV market is brutal: manufacturers aren’t making any money."

    With so little 4K content why would I bother with (or pay a premium for) a 4K TV?

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