Items tagged with PowerVR
With the incredible amount of product that Apple pushes, and the company's knack for secrecy, it's easy to understand why Apple would want to use as much in-house hardware as possible. Doing so doesn't just allow Apple to claim that the lion's share of the technology in its devices is its own, but it allows them to to better-tune the products from top to bottom. In 2008, we saw the company acquire chip producer PA Semi, which eventually resulted in the creation of Apple's A-series chips. Now, according to Ars Technica, we could see the company next snatch up Imagination Technologies. You might not know the Imagination Technologies name, but chances are good that you've used one of its products:...
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For the past few years, ARM has been steadily chipping away at rival PowerVR's domination of the Android and tablet GPU space. While Imagination Technologies dominated the early days of the industry, we've seen a number of competitors emerge since, thanks to aggressive products from Nvidia at the high end and companies like Vivante in the lower-end and midrange spaces. With Mali, ARM is trying to offer a comprehensive solution that can span the entire market, from budget products aimed at Eastern nations to high-end hardware suitable for a next-generation smartphone or tablet. Today, ARM is announcing two new GPU core products -- the Mali-T760 and the Mali-T720. The T760 is the upper-end part,...
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For the last 20 years, NVIDIA has developed and used its own graphics IP in-house. While the company engaged in several prominent cross-licensing deals with companies like Intel, those deals never resulted in an Intel-branded graphics card or an equivalent product from another company. Today, that changes -- NVIDIA has announced that henceforth, it will license its graphics designs to other companies. In a blog post today, company spokesperson David Shannon writes: "our next step is to license our GPU cores and visual computing patent portfolio to device manufacturers to serve the needs of a large piece of the market... We’ll start by licensing the GPU core based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture,...
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For over 10 years, the desktop and mobile graphics space has been dominated by two players: Nvidia and AMD/ATI. After 3dfx collapsed, there was a brief period of time when it looked as though Imagination Technologies might establish itself as a third option. Ultimately, that didn't happen -- the company's tile-based rendering solution, Kyro, failed to gain much mass-market support and faded after two generations. Now, there's a flurry of evidence to suggest that Imagination Technologies plans to re-enter PC market, but from the opposite direction. Rather than building expensive discrete solutions, IT is focused on deploying GPUs that can challenge Nvidia and AMD solutions in tablets, mobile phones,...
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At the iPad 3 next-gen iPad unveiling this week, Apple flashed up a slide claiming that the iPad 2 was 2x as fast as Nvidia's Tegra 3, while the new iPad would be 4x more powerful than Team Green's best tablet. Nvidia's response, delivered by spokesperson Ken Brown, boils down to "Hey guys, it's flattering to be compared to you, but how about a little data on which tests you ran and how you crunched the numbers?" Nvidia is absolutely right to call Apple out on the meaningless nature of such a comparison, and the company is likely feeling a bit dogpiled given that TI was waving unverified webpage benchmarks around less than two weeks ago. Both claimed sets of results are equally invalid, but there's...
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The Motorola Xoom was a notorious flop thanks to a sky-high price tag, features that didn't work for months (the company didn'ts tart upgrading the tablet to its promised 4G capability until late this fall), and a buggy implementation of Honeycomb that was a direct result of Motorola pushing too hard for an early launch. Moto, defiant in the face of such failure, went back to the drawing board and has given us the Xyboard / Xoom 2. The new tablet doesn't just replicate some of the mistakes that doomed its predecessor, it adds new flaws and foibles. This, my friends, is dedication at its finest. First, let's talk specs. The new Xyboard comes in 8.2" and 10.1" flavors with full retail prices of...
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The specs and capabilities of modern smartphones/handheld devices have been increasing rapidly for several years and according to the GPU developers of Imagination Technologies, the sky's the limit. The company owns and develops the PowerVR 3D architecture that dominates the mobile 3D segment; company reps at GDC this week have told journalists that it's already designing smartphone-style GPUs that will deliver PS3-quality graphics and come to market in the next three years. Games wouldn't be limited to tiny screens or lousy resolutions either, but could be delivered (or output to TV) at 720P. This sort of capability is just one of Imagination Technologies' targets. The company has already been...
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The fusion of the Internet and television, once thought to be as natural as peanut butter and chocolate, has proven to be a tricky problem for would-be content producers. Consumers have embraced direct downloads, but the concept of the television-as-interactive-device has never found traction in a shipping product. Intel wants to see that change, and has launched a new SoC (system-on-chip) family meant to give content creators and users a broader range of options and a better overall experience. The new CE4100 series will replace Intel's older CE3100, which launched last year. Unlike that chip, which was built around a low-power iteration of the Pentium-M with a clockspeed of 800MHz, the new...
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Some game companies have already made the statement that the iPhone is the future of gaming. With the addition of a PowerVR chip to the new iPhone 3GS, we are bound to see more, and better games come to Apple's hot device. Here's an example of a game that will work decently with any version of the iPhone, and any version of the OS 2.0 or higher.It's called Raving Manor. Yes, it's an adventure game. No, it's not text-based (a la Zork), nor is it as complex as say Myst. Rather, this game sort of combines a comic book or graphic novel feel with an adventure game, in which you have to puzzle your way out of situations, try things you might not ordinarily think of, etc. etc. ...
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