back to article Meet the 'smallest GPU' for wearable gizmos ... wait, where did it go?

The official launch of Android Wear was less than a month ago, but Imagination Technologies has this week unveiled a tiny graphics processor that it reckons will be just the thing for your snazzy new smartwatch. The single-core PowerVR GX5300 GPU is just 0.55mm2 – apparently the "world's smallest" – and squeezes in full OpenGL …

  1. Charles 9

    I don't know how close to accurate most of those claims are, but I suspect the "tile-based" part is entirely accurate. From what I recall of my Dreamcast days, this was a specialty of the PowerVR GPU line.

  2. Lionel Baden

    chip per app

    as per title.

  3. The last doughnut
    Happy

    You clever buggers

  4. Alan Denman

    Must be in the iWatch.

    I imagine so but importantly for Imagination, they need to sell elsewhere as Apple now seem to be their life support machine.

    Working for Apple is sometimes like ticking a No Publicity Box.

    1. tojb

      Re: Must be in the iWatch.

      @Charles 9: yes, the block diagram looks vaguely familiar, they have an architecture that seems to work, with some patents that protect it and that is what they are sticking with. If better solutions are known, they probably require a lot of M&A or patent trading to be allowed to use them.

      @Denman: they've tried to the one-big-customer high wire act before, with Sega as Charles9 remarked. They muddled through when that came to an end, I'm sure good old British pluck will see them through the next crisis too.

  5. Christian Berger

    I don't even know if that makes sense

    I mean sure, "smart"-watches had and will have displays, and in the future devices sold as "smart"-watches will have pixel based displays. However they are rather small, so it's hard to display any significant amount of information. What's even worse is that touch interfaces make it really hard to interact with them in any meaning full way. So I'm not sure how important this will be.

    What might be more important would be voice recognition. Currently it's the only way to give semi-complex commands to a mobile phone. Maybe we will one day whisper to our watches - Michael Knight style. :)

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