Vivante Corporation Dynamic GUI Composition Engine Lowers GPU Power Consumption Up To 5X

SUNNYVALE, Calif., June 10, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Vivante Corporation, a leading supplier of graphics and visualization technologies for mobile and consumer entertainment applications, announced today industry wide adoption of its energy saving display and pixel composition engine by 5 of the top 10 application processor vendors and used in over 30 SoC designs. The composition and GUI engine is a super-fast 2D and pixel processing pipeline that supports up to 8K x 8K resolution. This technology can blend, scale, animate, layer, filter, process, and combine multiple input sources (3D, 2D, HD Video) to compose for final viewing. The IP block can be combined with Vivante's complete line of ultra-low power, high performance 3D engine or other 3D cores to create the ultimate visual experience and power scalable solution that cuts power by up to 5X. Support for all CPU architectures is supported, including ARM, MIPS, x86 and PowerPC.    

(Photo:  http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20091008/VIVANTELOGO)

Today, the industry is at an inflection point where existing solutions driving eye catching UIs and responsive user experiences have to balance performance and battery life for all-day/multi-day use. The results have shown a strain on battery life as additional processing power is required to drive larger screen resolutions, pixel counts and display sizes. To resolve this power/usage dilemma, Vivante is delivering an essential piece of the puzzle and created a breakthrough of this barrier.

Current implementations to accelerate GUI and display functions are mainly done using the 3D engine. Since 85% of device usage is for non-3D applications, the ideal power savings turns off the 3D engine and uses the specialized 2D/Composition engine to do the heavy lifting for display tasks. The powerful GUI composition engine can focus on rendering stunning user interfaces with substantial power savings due to purpose-built hardware that is optimized for task-specific workloads. The 3D engine is now free to focus on 3D intensive activities.

Vivante's energy efficient solutions help scale system performance and reduce power by load-balancing graphics resources, offloading GUI processing from the 3D to the 2D composition engine, and creating an optimal switchable graphics implementation that can dynamically change between 2D and 2D+3D. Battery life can be extended for hours while users continue to experience accelerated GUI/display effects. The addition of a Vivante 2D composition core with any 3D engine will bring the best balance of performance, visual fidelity, power savings and bandwidth efficiency.      

"Vivante's clever breakthrough off-loads the 3D engine and focuses on the essential needs of the tasks at hand," said Dr. Jon Peddie, of Jon Peddie Research, the multimedia's industry's market research firm. "Capturing the leading SoC suppliers as clients, I expect to see this approach used by most if not all suppliers."

Vivante CEO Wei-Jin Dai says, "Our vision is this innovative technology should be in every application processor that powers high resolution Android screens. We have succeeded in developing an important piece of the visual ecosystem as market demand for better graphics, real time effects, and instant UI response keeps growing. With SoC designers at a cross road of balancing visual performance and power, our IP will help bridge this gap by being a fundamental piece of the solution and lowering the overall system power. Consumers can have a memorable user experience and solutions providers can create the next wave of popular multimedia devices with GUI acceleration that steps it up to the next level."

About Vivante Corporation

Vivante, a leading supplier of graphics and visualization technologies, provides the highest performance in the most area efficient designs with the lowest power characteristics across a range of Khronos Group API and Android conformant products based on the ultra-threaded ScalarMorphic(TM) architecture. The organization's focus on development and engineering excellence, and customer-focused dedication, has helped transform the company into a key technology provider used by the world's leading semiconductor companies. Vivante GPUs ship in customer silicon solutions across a wide range of consumer electronics and embedded platforms running the latest graphics and multimedia intensive applications. Vivante is a privately held company incorporated in California and headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley. Global R&D centers span the U.S., Europe and China. For more information, visit http://www.vivantecorp.com

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SOURCE Vivante Corporation