MWC 2014: Imagination Technologies talks about MIPS and raytracing

Imagination
Using your imagination

We swung by Imagination Technology's booth to check out the company's latest announcements. It has introduced two new GPU parts, the PowerVR 6XT and the 6XE.

The first is geared towards performance with clock speeds of up to 600MHz while the latter is optimised for power saving.

The 6XT delivers console-like quality (at least compared to the previous generation) according to a spokesperson for the British company.

Raytracing coming to PowerVR

He also added that the transition from Series 5 to Series 6 is likely to be swift as an increasing number of hardware partners have already licensed the solution and look to roll it out first in high end devices and then across their entire portfolios.

The next version of PowerVR however will go even further and will integrate raytracing, a property that will allow users to benefit from even more life-like renderings in games and other computer-generated images.

Uses of raytracing however go beyond gaming with user interfaces and augmented reality likely to benefit from this leap in picture quality.

Imagination Technologies also demoed a new hardware solution that allows 4K encode and decode and will be available for Series 5 and 6.

An update on MIPS

As for MIPS, the processor company purchased by Imagination last year, our interlocutor mentioned some of the challenges met.

Red tape and previous nervousness about the future of MIPS as an independent entity ranked quite high. But the future of MIPS is now more secure than ever.

Imagination has more than double the headcount of its processor business and promises to deliver a faster product cycle starting with the successor to Warrior.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.