Imagination technologies, renowned for their PowerVR GPUs, has released a new GPU tailor made for smartwatches and other wearable devices — the PowerVR GX5300. 

What makes Imagination’s offering different from the competition is that it has been built from the ground up for wearables, which makes it more power and space efficient than them.

In fact, the GX5300 is the smallest (0.55mm2) OpenGL ES 2.0 GPU that is capable of running Android or Android Wear, and also driving displays of 480p or 720p resolution without a hitch. Imagination has also worked hard on optimizing the GPU’s power consumption levels, which makes it sip power compared to offerings from Qualcomm.

The PowerVR GX5300 does not come with any CPU so it is up to other silicon vendors to integrate the GPU on their chips. On the plus side, PowerVR is one of the official launch partners of Android Wear so sooner or later, we are bound to see its GPU make its way to an Android Wear running smartwatch, which should hopefully provide better battery life than what the Qualcomm powered ones currently do.

• SourceImgTec