But a speedy main processor is only half the story. Imagination's quad-core SGX543 GPU is a radical departure from previous versions, according to Peter McGuinness, director of business environment at Imagination. "The [new] version has a wider data path so, it's got twice the shader throughput," he said. Shader refers to the software instructions used to calculate rendering effects. "The emphasis now is on the number of shader instructions you can execute per clock"--or number of instructions per each tick of the processor cycle.
McGuinness continued. "Each core has multiple shader pipelines. The 535--which Intel used originally in its Menlow [Atom processor]--that has two shader pipelines. The Samsung Galaxy S...that's an SGX540. That has four shader pipelines. The 543 has the same number of pipelines but each pipeline is twice as powerful.
The [quad-core graphics chip] in the Sony machine would be roughly eight times as powerful as [the Samsung Galaxy S]," he said.