Imagination's PowerVR Rogue Architecture Explored

In what should prove to be an extremely eventful and important day for our coverage and understanding of SoC GPUs, Imagination chosen to share more details about the inner workings of their Rogue Series 6 and Series 6XT architectures. This, a first for the company, gives us our first in-depth look at the architecture that’s powering a number of high-end products (not the least of which is all of Apple’s current-gen products) and descended from some of the most widely used SoC GPU designs of all time.

The bulk of the details Imagination is making available relate to their Unified Shading Cluster (USC) shading block, the heart of the Series 6/6XT GPUs. They aren’t discussing other aspects of their designs such as their geometry processors, cache structure, or Tile Based Deferred Rendering system – the company’s secret sauce and most potent weapon for SoC efficiency – but hopefully one day we’ll get there. In the meantime we will have our hands full just taking our first look at the Series 6/6XT USCs.