PowerVR 531 is out and about

IMAGINATION TECHNOLOGIES, developers of the Power VR marchitecture, have come up with the follow-up to the Power VR SGX 530, aptly dubbed the 531.

The SGX 531 is now available for licensing. Other Imagination Technologies products include the 535 and 545 desktop-targeting cores that support APIs like DX9 and DX10.1.

‘Wot’s that?’ you ask. ‘DX10.1?!’ and it’s not from DAAMIT? Yes, and although Imagination is no ATI or Nvidia, the firm ships millions of these cores per year. Their current graphics core can render anywhere between 2 to 100 million triangles per second, and those are relatively conservative figures based on low power consumption and less-than-50% shader load.

The upgraded PowerVR core features a wider 128-bit internal system bus, which will feed more data to the core to crunch as well as leaving some headroom for further improvements down the line (more cores?). Power VR does not note a direct performance increase in its info, but rather improved performance in frame rate intensive apps such as 1080p video decode (something the Power VR SGX 530 was already capable). Very well sir, want some Blu-ray vid with your MID? Coming right up!

But that’s not all. We rang up Imagination HQ and got some details on forthcoming attractions.

Regarding the Netbook affair with Intel, and faced with a straight-off ‘are you collaborating on Netbook 2.0, in the same manner?’ Imagination’s Head o’PR, David Harold, was quite candid. "Intel have a significant number of licences with us, so it would be a sensible continuation," he said. OK. Netbook 2.0 … check.

The very capable PowerVR 3D processing, that owes its 3D fame to the tile-based rendering (that’s been sidelined by Nvidia and ATI for ages now) added Shader support in early 2007 – and it seems it will continue straddling this feature set for some time. Right now, Shader technology on the chip used on Intel’s Atom platform is Shader 3.0+.

The Series-6 Power VR marchitecture is still in the works, but when asked about the feature set, the Head o’PR said, "It’s fair to say the things we’ve focused on – tile-based rendering and processing core – will continue in the future. The 5-series will co-exist and continue to receive upgrades – as is the case now with the Power VR 4- and 5-series."

The company, however, has more projects in the lab. It’s been collaborating with TI and the OpenPandora.org handheld gaming console which seems to suit the Power VR chippery like a glove. You can check the Pandora here. You just can’t shake the feeling it takes the iron crowbar to Nintendo’s and Sony’s forehead.

When asked about getting back in the console market, David Harold said they’d be very interested, provided the opportunity arises. Considering the success Imagination Technologies had in the Japanese market a few years back, you’d expect Sony or Nintendo to get a wake-up call when it comes to handheld gaming. Although Sony runs a proprietary graphics core, it’s fairly underpowered by Power VR standards, and Nintendo, well, they just run the graphics off the ARM processor… so there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Imagination’s take on the market is that, right now, UMPCs are hot, although MIDs are a natural cross-over with their smartphone partners. Personal Navigation Devices (GPS) are suffering an evolution of sorts, from 2D data with 3D visualization to 3D data with 3D visualization – a process that takes some time as it is up to the map companies to provide the raw data – of course Power VR is the technology to have, according to David. At the same time, the overall cost of the marchitecture is coming down, making it widely affordable to more ‘popular’ brands of devices.

So what’s the deal with Power VR? Imagination wants to break into the laptop market with their new designs, which appear more than capable of dealing with day-to-day computing, but they haven’t scored any design wins… yet. They won’t go chasing Dell or HP for this, but pitch their tech as part of a platform or an ODM solution. Their mobile 3D sounds pretty tight, but companies are yet to take real benefit of the marchitecture, which is a shame, and the truth of the matter is that Nvidia’s Tegra is nowhere to be seen.

ImgTec's partners, Samsung and Texas Instruments seem to be poised for delivering most of the hot new items with Power VR, but that's just in the mobile and MID camp.

By the way, kudos to David, he’s one of those PR chaps who actually knows what the company is doing and can talk about it. µ