14 DAY TRIAL // While NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices are the best known purveyors of graphics technologies, they don't exactly have such a large stake in the mobile market, where companies like Imagination Technologies are making grabs.
The thing about the mobile market is that it has reached a stage where small, handheld products have performance that is on part with that of the desktops of previous decades.
The main reason for this is the progression of Moore's Law and, thus, the drastic gradual rise in chip performance and power efficiency.
Given that mobile processing power is now so high, it stands to reason that companies would research graphics technologies capable of keeping up with it.
Imagination Technologies have one such solution, dubbed “Rogue,” a GPU (graphics processing unit) that is part of the PowerVR 6 series.
Turns out that this particular solution has actually drawn the attention of a fair number of lead partners, six to be exact.
“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,” said Hossein Yassaie, chief executive officer of Imagination.
The “Rogue” will end up in SoC (system-on-chip) devices based on the OMAP platform, meaning that, they will end up inside smartphones, tablets, embedded systems, etc.
One example, for those that want specific details, is the new Nova line of smartphone application chips from ST-Ericsson. MediaTek and Texas Instruments are two more of the six partners that chose the “Rogue.”
As for what the chip actually does, it is compatible with existing software while delivering high levels of GFLOPS per square millimeter and per mW for all APIs.
Developers should be able to easily upgrade Series-5-aimed applications and will also benefit from Series5 and Series5XT PowerVR SGX GPU compatibility.