PowerVR Technologies

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PowerVR Technologies is a subsidiary of Imagination Technologies (formerly VideoLogic) and develops graphics solutions for PCs , arcade machines , mobile devices and game consoles . The company licenses its intellectual property to other manufacturers, who then develop them into finished products.

In 2017, Imagination Technologies and the PowerVR division were bought by the Chinese investor Canyon Bridge Capital Partners .

history

PowerVR Technologies emerged from VideoLogic's graphics development division on August 31, 1999 following a corporate reorganization .

technology

PowerVR uses its own technology, the so-called tile-based deferred rendering , i.e. a delayed image calculation based on tiles. The deferred rendering has the same effect as the hidden surface removal (HSR) of modern immediate renderer such as Nvidia GeForce- series, or AMD Radeon series, namely that polygons covered by the other and therefore are not visible, are discarded before rendering so that bandwidth and fill rate are saved. To optimize this effect, PowerVR divides a 3D scene into several tiles and this HSR-like process is carried out in each tile .

This technology makes it possible to outperform the competition's graphics chips with actually higher computing power. Since one is always dependent on a licensee for the production of the corresponding graphics chips, there are often delays until a new generation reaches the market.

Products

Series 1

The Series 1 was only used for the two PC graphics chips NEC PowerVR PCX 1 and PCX2. These two chips came on the market in 1996 and 1997, respectively.

Series 2

Just six months after the NEC PowerVR PCX 2, the Series 2 , i.e. the next generation, was announced in 1997 , and corresponding products should be on the market soon. The Series 2 was used for arcade machines , game consoles and PCs : as the NEC CLX2 in the Sega Dreamcast and the arcade devices Sega NAOMI and NAOMI 2 and as the NEC Neon 250 for PC graphics cards. Since the console chip had higher priority, the PC graphics chip did not come onto the market until 1999 and was no longer competitive.

Series 3

In June 2000, STMicroelectronics, a new licensee for the Series 3 PowerVR technology, was announced and an entire family of graphics chips, ST Kyro , was developed.

Series 4

Since the only licensee of the Series 4 , STMicroelectronics, withdrew from the graphics business, no graphics chips were developed on this basis. PowerVR announced in the fall of 2002 that all developments on Series 4 had been discontinued.

Series 5

Instead, the focus was on developing the Series 5 . Series 5 is said to be a high-end graphics chip, which u. a. also has pixel and vertex shaders 3.0. In the spring of 2004, Sega was found as a licensee for the arcade sector, but none for the PC sector. Sega also left his license unused.

MBX

PowerVR MBX is a high-performance 3D chip for smartphones and PDAs , which is mainly based on the Series 3. It is therefore an energy-optimized relative of the Kyro. After seven of the ten largest chip manufacturers (including Intel , Texas Instruments , NEC , Renesas Technology and Samsung ) licensed it, their products were used in the high-end devices that were current in 2008/09, the most famous of which are the N95 from Nokia and the iPhone from Apple .

SGX

PowerVR SGX is the successor to the MBX and is based on an improved Series 5. SGX has unified shaders that even go beyond Shader version 4.0 of Direct3D 10. Also, OpenGL 2.0, OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1 with the Extension Pack and OpenVG 1.0.1 & 1.1 is fully supported. The chip is available in eight performance levels and was able to win over the licensees of the predecessor. These supplied older generation of mobile devices such as iPhone 3GS , Nokia N900 , Palm pre and Samsung Wave .

Since the PowerVR SGX is a very flexible design, Intel used this base for its first Centrino Atom platform as a supplement to its Intel System Controller Hub "Poulsbo" in the form of the GMA 500 / US15W . Here the SGX535 graphics core was combined with the PowerVR video chip VXD370. In the driver development outsourced by Intel to Tungsten Graphics, only a few possibilities of the graphics unit are apparently used. In its successor, PineView, Intel is now again using a modification of its own graphics chip (a marginally modified GMA 950 called GMA 3150).

For its current PlayStation Vita handheld console, Sony also uses a graphics chip based on the SGX architecture called SGX 543 MP4 +. This is an optimized variant of the PowerVR SGX 543 MP2, which is equipped with four instead of two graphics cores and is built into the iPhone 4s .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Benjamin Kraft: Imagination Technologies sold to Chinese investor group. In: Heise online . September 24, 2017 . Retrieved June 17, 2018.
  2. ↑ Press release from Imagination Technologies
  3. ↑ Poor 3D performance of the GMA500 (pages 10 to 12)
  4. ↑ PineView graphics chip
  5. ↑ Specifications of the PS Vita
  6. ↑ Apple A5 CPU

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