Advanced VP9 decoder now available for Imagination's PowerVR Series6 GPUs

OpenCL-based solution offers low-power, full frame rate performance for YouTube video on mobile devices and beyond

MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS, Barcelona, Spain – 25 February, 2014 – Imagination Technologies (IMG.L) announces that an advanced GPU accelerated VP9 software decoder for its industry-leading PowerVR Series6 Rogue graphics processors (GPUs) is available from Imagination’s strategic partner MulticoreWare.

Developed in partnership with Google, the OpenCL-based decoder supports playback of YouTube video at 1080p, 30fps, providing a low-power solution for HD video on devices such as mobile devices, tablets, connected TVs and other products. With this new decoder, existing products with PowerVR Series6 GPUs can now play VP9 generated content.

VP9 is a high-performance codec that compresses video files and streams to approximately half the size of previous generation encoding technologies, making it ideal for addressing HD and 4K video. Part of the Google-sponsored WebM open web media project, VP9 will be used for YouTube and Google Hangouts as well as other web-based video applications.

Says Peter McGuinness, director of multimedia technology marketing, Imagination: “GPU compute is ideal for fast-response support of emerging video standards ahead of their availability in hardware. This new software decoding solution for VP9 empowers our licensees and their OEM customers who want to support VP9 video content on existing PowerVR enabled devices. Imagination fully supports VP9 and the WebM project, offering our customers and end users a choice of leading video codecs.”

With the new VP9 decoder for PowerVR GPUs, compute-intensive tasks are offloaded from the CPU to the GPU, leading to significantly overall lower power consumption. The use of OpenCL enables customers to optimize the VP9 decoder for their specific platform, thereby ensuring the highest performance, judder-free playback, all while maximizing battery life. VP9 accelerated decode on the PowerVR GPU offers customers a short-term solution to augment the capabilities of their current hardware video decoders. Customers using the industry’s leading video IP solution, the PowerVR video decoder family also benefit from a unified software stack.

Says Matt Frost, senior business product manager, WebM Project, Google: “Imagination’s popular PowerVR GPUs combined with VP9 offer high definition video from YouTube and video conferencing from Google Hangouts, with as little as half the bandwidth currently used. Imagination is helping to propel the industry forward by joining the VP9 partner ecosystem.”

Demonstration at Mobile World Congress

In its booth number 6E30 at Mobile World Congress, Imagination will demonstrate the YouTube video player running hardware-accelerated VP9 video content on a PowerVR GPU. Mobile World Congress is being held February 24-28 in Barcelona, Spain.

Availability

The VP9 decoder for PowerVR Series6 GPUs is available now from Imagination partner MulticoreWare. Contact info@multicorewareinc.com for more information. For more information on PowerVR IP, contact Imagination at info@imgtec.com.

About PowerVR graphics

Imagination’s PowerVR graphics technologies are the de facto standard for mobile and embedded graphics. The PowerVR Rogue architecture is designed to support the features of the latest graphics APIs including OpenGL ES 1.1/2/3.0 and beyond, OpenGL 3.x/4.x, and designed for full WHQL-compliant DirectX 9/10, with certain family members extending their capabilities to DirectX 11.1 functionality. PowerVR Rogue GPUs deliver full support for all popular and emerging GPU compute APIs including OpenCL 1.x and Renderscript, delivering an optimal balance of performance versus power consumption for mobile and embedded devices.

About Imagination Technologies

Imagination is a global technology leader whose products touch the lives of billions of people throughout the world. The company’s broad range of silicon IP (intellectual property) includes the key multimedia, communications and general purpose processors needed to create the SoCs (Systems on Chips) that power all mobile, consumer, automotive, enterprise, infrastructure, IoT and embedded electronics. These are complemented by its unique software and cloud IP and system solution focus, enabling its licensees and partners get to market quickly by creating and leveraging highly differentiated SoC platforms. Imagination’s licensees include many of the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturers, network operators and OEMs/ODMs who are creating some of the world’s most iconic and disruptive products. See: www.imgtec.com.