All Articles Tagged imagination

Imagination makes the PowerVR graphics core chip (GPU) that powers the current generations of iPhone and iPod touch handsets. Apple likes them enough to have become a huge licensor and even investor in the company. Well, it’s looking like that investment may pay off for iPhone users in the next generation iPhone and iPod touch (which TiPb is still predicting will hit in July and September respectively).

Even bigger news? It looks like these new multi-core chips will be transparent from the developer’s point of view. That means Apple has far less risk in “fracturing the platform” by adding more GPU firepower to the next gen iPhone. Also, they look to be supporting OpenCL, Apple’s open source implementation that allows GPUs to be treated like CPUs and boost general purpose computing when they’re not throwing polygons and pixels around our favorite games or movies.

Says the Register (via MacRumors):

Without any intervention by the application – and, more importantly, without any intervention by the application’s developer – the driver will pass data to an “MP code scheduler,” which will in turn pass that data to one pipeline scheduler per core, which will then pass it to one thread scheduler per multi-threaded processing engine, which will then manage the threads through the engines as they process the graphics data.

In other words, the SGX543 can have any number of cores from two to sixteen with no change in the driver software or the application. All that complex data/pipeline/thread management is done in hardware. No muss, no fuss.

But a whole lot of “we want it now!”…

Apple Insider’s Prince McLean, whose pieces often seem.. ahem… Roughly Drafted… brings us an in depth look for what we might see in the next generation, 3G iPhone, and in a word, it’s hardcore.

McLean begins with a profile of Imagination’s Open GL ES 1.1, PowerVR MBX that powers the current iPhone (and many other mobile devices), and then gets into the next generation, 2.0, PowerVR SGX — which brings the shaders, and the VDX core with its mobile HD video codec.

Putting the pieces together, including an unprecedented Samsung announcement that it will be manufacturing these technologies, Imagination’s mysterious unnamed licensee, and the flexibility the newly acquired PA Semi gives them, design-wise, McLean (through some assumptive leaps, to be sure), paints a glowing picture of Apple’s future gaming and video potential:

By gaining access to exclusive new generations of mobile graphics technology, Apple can differentiate its products from other smartphones and mobile Internet devices with an edge in performance while offering full support for industry standard OpenGL ES graphics. [...]

Whether this theory is ultimately proven true or not, I think the SDK event — and its clear focus on games — showed that Apple finally might just be taking the space seriously. What do you think?