Imagination Technologies looking to clusters, not cores with next-gen mobile GPU

With Nvidia going down the multi-core path with its latest range of Tegra processors, you'd probably expect its mobile GPU competitors to take a similar approach given the advertised advantages regarding power consumption the Tegra 3 possesses.

However, Imagination Technologies, whose GPU architecture makes up the chips in the new iPad, iPhone 4S, and Sony's PlayStation Vita, is heading off down a different path.

Speaking to Pocket Gamer earlier in the month, the British company revealed that its next range of smartphone and tablet graphics processors - the PowerVR Series6 "Rogue" - will not use traditional cores, but will instead employ what the company calls "clusters".

These clusters are effectively arrays of computational power that can be scaled to the manufacturer's choice for implementation in everything from PCs to smartphones. This, in theory, should offer increased processing capabilities with even more control over power consumption.

The company went on to tell me that it expected the new architecture to easily surpass the Tegra 3, pointing out that the iPad 2's chip (with a GPU based on Series5 architecture) already outperforms Nvidia's chip in benchmarks by around 30 per cent.

With today's news of plans from Nvidia to bring its power efficient PC desktop architecture Kepler to mobile devices in the near future, expect the hardware war between Android and iOS machines to get considerably hotter (figuratively speaking, we hope).