14 DAY TRIAL // Imagination Technologies has revealed its support for unified Shaders. We know that because The Inquirer talked with "two very important chaps from the company, a VP and one of the key engineers and they were happy to answer at least some of the questions."
Intel will decide if it wants to announce what it wants to do with the just-licensed Power VR SGX programmable core. The company dismissed its PDA CPU division and wants to get some graphics capability for smaller devices, to use the marchitecture for UPC. Despite the rumours of Intel buying Nvidia, it still can use a nice graphic core for integration such as the one that Power VR has, reports the same source.
Furthermore, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Tom Tom and many other use this graphic core, so why not Intel? Nokia and Sony Ericsson have Texas Instrument's chips inside. Tom Tom has Renesas. The list of the chip makers to use Power VR marchitecture is rather long. In the meantime, Imagination reports that Renesas Technology Corp, one of the world's leading semiconductor system solutions providers, has licensed a second member of the PowerVR SGX graphics / video core family under a multiple-use license arrangement. As previously reported, another member of PowerVR SGX core family was licensed by Renesas in March 2006. Renesas has also licensed PowerVR MBX and PowerVR MBX Lite and is currently deploying these in automotive, consumer and mobile devices.
Under the terms of its licensing arrangements Imagination Technologies receives license fees and royalty revenues on SoCs incorporating Imagination Technologies' IP shipped by partners.
Power VR SXG intellectual property graphic core supports OpenGL ES 2.0 and it does support Unified Shaders. In fact, it virtually supports Shader model 4.0 as well. The company agreed that the power of the chip is beyond Shader model 3.0 and can at least be called 3.x if not higher. The chip might just have enough to be called a Unified DirectX 10 part, but no one at the company wanted to confirm or deny this claim, said the reporters.
PowerVR SGX, the new generation PowerVR shader based graphics and video technology family, is part of the Imagination's PowerVR Series5 scalable and fully programmable shader graphics and video core family. With state-of-the-art support for 2D and 3D PowerVR SGX has an industry-leading feature set that exceeds OGL 2.0 shader and Microsoft Vertex and Pixel Shader Model 3 requirements. The Power SGX family can also perform video/image decode and encode processing for standards such as H.264, MPEG4/2, WMV, JPEG and others. PowerVR SGX family members target mobile, automotive, consumer and PC markets.