Power VR headed back to a desktop near you

WE CHECKED Imagination Technologies' latest roadmap and to our surprise we learned that, after years of absence, the company is ready to reintroduce desktop and portable Power VR cores.

Its previous offerings, the Kyro and Kyro 2 cores were pretty successful, but since then we haven't seen anything from the Power VR stable on the desktop.

The firm made an effort to make a Kyro 3 but never completed the chip. Later it moved to the handheld market where it made a killing.

There are two codenames on the roadmap that tip up by the end of the year, related to portable and desktop graphics. The first one is set for the end of the 2006 and it is codenamed Muse.

This will effectively be a fifth-generation part, with programmable pixel and vertex shading but we don't have any other additional details about it.

A second offering, codenamed Athena is the real thing based on SGX, supporting programmable Shaders. It is set for sometime in 2007 - later rather than sooner, we suggest

As Intel licensed Imagniation's MBX, it may also license the SGX core as well. We suspect Intel wants muscle its way into the discrete graphics. Might it be tempted towards these Muse and Athena cores.

We will keep our eyes open, especially now ATI and AMD have become one. µ