Huge advances in the semiconductor industry have meant that the number of transistors on a given area of silicon has practically doubled every two years. This increase in efficiency has paved the way for engineers to add additional x86 processor cores and further functionalities to the processor dies, making today’s CPUs the fastest, most versatile and energy-efficient processors ever.


Even with these enormous improvements in computing performance and power consumption, one area of the embedded computing sector has until now not been able to keep up with the rapid advancement pace: graphics performance. As the advantages of embedded technology make gains in new vertical markets, such as multi-media content delivery applications, kiosks, POI/POS and the professional gaming arena, all of which make extremely high demands on graphics performance and require support via the latest APIs (like DirectX11), OEMs have had to search for solutions that meet these stiff requirements so as to create rich visual experiences for users.