Vivante's dynamic GUI composition engine lowers GPU power consumption up to 5X

SUNNYVALE, USA: Vivante Corp., a leading supplier of graphics and visualization technologies for mobile and consumer entertainment applications, announced 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.

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 percent 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.