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POWERVR mobile graphics chips top 250,000 units

by Scott Bicheno on 9 March 2010, 14:32

Tags: Imagination Technologies (LON:IMG)

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Shouting from the rooftops

This is one of those corporate milestone bits of news - like iTunes sells its zillionth track - but a valid one nonetheless. As mobile devices are increasingly used for graphically intensive tasks like playing games or watching video, graphics processing will become ever more important.

And no company (except, possibly, NVIDIA) is counting on that more than UK multimedia chip designer Imagination Technologies, which is why its shouting from the rooftops that over 250 million devices - which include phones, media players and other embedded applications - have now shipped that contain its POWERVR chips.

Imagination specialises in low-power graphics cores in much the same way ARM does processor cores. In fact, for some time, when ARM sold a CPU license it recommended an Imagination graphics core too. That all changed when ARM got into the graphics business with Mali, and now the two companies are competitors.

As the chronology would imply, it's ARM that's playing catch-up in the graphics market. Furthermore 16 percent of Imagination's shares are owned by Intel and 9.5 percent by Apple, so it's got some serious backers.

The POWERVR SGX family is of most interest to the mobile Internet, with the 530 providing the graphics for TI's OMAP 3430 and the 540 in the OMAP 4 series. Both TI SoCs also use ARM cpu designs - Cortex A8 and A9, respectively.

Graphics market watcher John Peddie said the following when Imagination announced it has crossed the 100 OEM product threshold for  POWERVR SGX graphics. "Simply put: Imagination's POWERVR is the standard for mobile 3D graphics. The company has built an enviable lead, but more than that it has created an opportunity for both its customers, and the wider developer ecosystem to build a market that for applications alone will be worth more than $5 billion dollars in 2010."

One of the thinks Imagination was keen to draw attention to at MWC was the ability of its SGX 540 chip to support multiple screens and screen-in-screen, as shown on this demo system. Underneath there's a POWERVR roadmap.

 

 



HEXUS Forums :: 3 Comments

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Wow, I didn't realise they were still around……..I have a PowerVR Apocalypse kicking around somewhere that I remember playing Tomb Raider and a few other games on…..back in the day!!
I heard somewhere that this chip is closely related to the one that used to be in the Dreamcast?

Might be a load of rubbish but if it is true that is a good sign!
So, is that 250,000 or 250,000,000? ;)

I wouldn't expect the architecture of the CLX2 used in the DreamCast to be similar to the the SGX given different power requirement, but if we go with the spec sheet, the basic SGX520 pushes as much polygons (7M/sec) as the CLX2. The SGX535 (used in the iPhone 3GS) can push twice as much polygons per second (oddly enough, the clockrate is written as equal to the SGX520, which is twice that of the CLX2). There is also the SGX540 and SGX545 which are both even faster (up to 40M polygons/sec - more than a GeForce2 Ultra/GeForce 3). Not how good polygons are as a measurement of performance though.