Called PVRIC4, the core  will be incorporated in next-generation PowerVR GPUs and is available for licensing now as a standalone IP block

The block is already used by Imagination partners, including Chips & Media.

PVRIC4 features a dual-pipeline frame buffer compression engine. 

A new lossy pipeline, used only if the lossless pipeline does not achieve 50 percent compression, ensures that even difficult-to-compress “noisy” images are compressed with the highest fidelity.

 A decision logic block determines which output should be used to guarantee the compression ratio, and due to highly tuned algorithms, the image quality change is imperceptible.

Thanks to this hybrid solution, PVRIC4 offers SoC manufacturers the best of both approaches, with the highest fidelity ensuring bandwidth and frame buffer allocation savings on graphics and video content. 

This is all performed in hardware and achieved without any performance overhead.