High-definition displays have seen growing adoption by mobile devices and created enormous pressure on the design of application processors since the transmission and processing of HD content rely on lots of support, such as bandwidth, memory capacity and processor performance. This has prompted the industry to introduce mobile GPU to mobile devices.
In 2013, about 10% of mobile devices worldwide feature 1080p displays, while WQHD-based displays have a share almost 2%, according to figures collected by Digitimes Research. It is believed that 1080p displays' share will rise to 20% and WQHD displays 5% in 2014.
Future mobile devices' average resolution is expected to surpass that of PCs, but since mobile devices' GPU performance is only one tenth of that of PC, it remains to be seen how GPU designers are going to maintain a balance between performance and power consumption.
This article is an excerpt from a Digitimes Research Special Report (2014 global mobile application processor market forecast). Visit our latest Special reports.