CXM GPUs Add HDR to Mainstream

Imagination Technologies’ new licensable CXM GPU family brings high-dynamic-range (HDR) support to its mainstream offering. With three new models, the company claims high area efficiency.

Bryon Moyer

Imagination Technologies’ new CXM series of licensable GPUs upgrades the company’s mainstream graphics offering, adding support for high-dynamic-range displays. Three configurations deliver two or four pixels per clock cycle and compute 64 or 128 floating-point operations per cycle.

The CXM series occupies the midrange of GPU applications between Imagination’s CXT and CXE lines. It updates the prior BXM series, although it provides lower floating-point performance than its predecessor. It’s also not optimized for multicore instantiation in the way the top BXM model was. The company claims high area efficiency but offers no data supporting that claim.

Imagination uses three-letter names for its newer GPUs: the first letter is the series; the middle is X; and the last is E for entry-level, M for mainstream, or T for top-end. Although the company has already launched the high-end DXT family, the midrange remains in the C series. Imagination’s newer distributed architecture, which facilitates easier multicore processing, applies only to the top-end families. CXM remains on the older centralized architecture.

Available for licensing now, the cores primarily drive displays in consumer applications with lower performance requirements than games—digital TVs, wearables such as smartwatches, and smart-home systems. They lack features such as ray tracing and variable-rate shading. CXM targets systems with newer HDR displays, which provide greater contrast, yielding richer images and a gamut of one billion colors (as compared with 16 million for standard dynamic range, or SDR). CXM implements the 10-bit-pixel requirement for handling HDR.