Jun 15, 2011 12:18 GMT  ·  By

Imagination Technologies, the company that provides the powerful graphics in Apple’s iPhone and iPad, has announced that its next-generation POWERVR Series6 architecture, codenamed ‘Rogue’, is now being licensed by six lead partners, one of which is likely Apple.

The company provides an ambiguous description of the new GPU family, noting that it “delivers unrivalled GFLOPS per mm2 and per mW for all APIs.”

It adds that POWERVR Series6 brings “not only a clear technology advantage and exceptional roadmap, driven by one of the largest teams of graphics engineers in the world, but also an extensive ecosystem of third party developers which has created hundreds of thousands of apps optimised for POWERVR enabled devices to date.”

Commenting on the initiative to license this technology to key partners, Imagination CEO Hossein Yassaie said that “The growing commitment of the primary players to our roadmap shows that, having evaluated the options, the overall mobile and embedded market is increasingly committing to POWERVR as the de facto graphics standard.”

Finally, the company enumerates three of the six POWERVR Series6 partners.

The first is ST-Ericsson. They’ve already announced that the new Nova family of smartphone application processors will incorporate the new POWERVR architecture.

The second is Texas Instruments, the legendary semiconductor and computer technology company whose plans with the new POWERVR Series6 include implementing the new architecture in future OMAP platform-based SoC (system-on-a-chip) designs, much like Apple’s own A4 and A5 chips assembled by Samsung.

The third and last partner Imagination Technologies allows itself to disclose is MediaTek. Imagination doesn’t specify what exactly they’ve licensed POWERVR Series6 for.

Finally, they note that “Three other POWERVR Series6 licensees are yet to be announced,” and one of them is sure to be Apple.

The Cupertino tech giant has been using POWERVR solutions in its iPhone and iPad with great success, and there is no indication Apple is looking elsewhere for added benefits.

The A5 chip and the POWERVR graphics inside the iPad 2 allow Apple to advertise the tablet as being capable of outputting nine times the graphical performance of the iPad 1.