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Intel Capital will invest £5.28m in Imagination (PowerVR)

Pottsey

Pottsey

Pottsey

Soldato
Joined
29 May 2006
Posts
5,357
This came at a bit of a surprised. There where plenty of rumours around about the two companies and as much as I wanted to believe them, I have to admit I put it down to wishful thinking.

“Hossein Yassaie, CEO, Imagination Technologies says: “Our relationship with Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor company, has reached a new stage that will see the companies working together to enable a growing range of Intel processors with Imagination’s industry-leading graphics and video capabilities. We are delighted to continue and extend this relationship with Intel for our new generation of PowerVR graphics and video cores.”

http://www.imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?ID=643 full press. I wonder what 3dchips will come out of this investment.
 
“Er, since when?
Its been a LONG time since they were anywhere near "industry-leading"
They only have something like 90% of the 3Dmobile market (*) and are only a good 2 generations ahead of ATI and Nvidia in those markets. Not really industry-leading at all. Things like unified shaders and vertex engines and FSAA with no performance loss are not industry-leading :) ;) .

Doing pretty well in the arcades as well and oddly slot machines


*Mobile as in PDA’s, Mobile phones e.c.t not laptops.

EDIT:
http://img275.imageshack.us/img275/2143/img43696053ff.jpg
http://www.nokia.com/nseries/index.html?lang=en&country=US
http://www.mobilewhack.com/reviews/nokia_n93_cell_phone.html
http://pandora.luxus.fi/e3blog/e3_06/games/games/one_next.aspx
 
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Someone else on another forum made a great post which I think sums up the money perfectly

“I don't know what this is about, but the amount of money is too small to be greatly signficant and too big to be greatly insignificant.”
 
“lol, your obviously not aware that X1800XT`s and 7900GTX`s are now available on laptops, benchmarks here.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile...List.844.0.html i assure you they eat for breakfast any crud powerVR has in the mobile / integrated arena.”
If you got back and read my post you will see I typed mobile market as in PDA, mobile phone, sat nav and other small device’s not laptops. Perhaps I should have put “excluding laptops” instead of “not laptops” to be clearer.

You will also find there are more mobile phones out there then laptops.

When you go into the full mobile market you will find PowerVR beat ATI and Nivida who have only really managed to decently penetrate the laptop market none of the other mobile markets.






“proof required... i would say its near impossibe for any graphics card to give anti aliasing without a performance hit of some discription.”
The only real cost for multisampling FSAA is bandwidth and its well-known fact PowerVR solved the bandwidth problem. PowerVR have lots of free bandwidth unlike everyone else due to the way their cards work. When you have as much bandwidth free as PowerVR you can turn on FSAA still have spare bandwidth and not suffer any FPS loss.

http://www.imgtec.com/PowerVR/products/Graphics/MBX/index.asp?Page=2





“indeed, these days there main field is mass produced low budget generic crap for economy range devices.“
There main field seems to be Dab radio which again they seen to have 70 to 90% of the market after beating everyone else out.

As for 3Dchips they deal in low end and super high end mobile device’s with advanced features. Pretty much most of the high end devices are all PowerVR based. As before I am not includeing large objects like laptops.

Look at the screenshots at http://pandora.luxus.fi/e3blog/e3_06/games/games/one_next.aspx then tell me PowerVR only deal in low budget generic crap for economy range devices. Things like that for a mobile phone and PDA are not low budget generic crap and its x10 better then anything ATI or Nvidia have in the same market.
 
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“ok, first of all, learn to use the quote button, youve been asked several times by people on these forums,”
Not a chance, people around here need to be more tolerant of people’s posting/writing styles. I post in lots of forums and this is the only one I get complaints in. I even had a pole and most people said they prefer or it’s ok to post like I do.




“and at that time you had no asterisk leading to a line saying "not laptops"”
The asterisk was in from the start, I am always careful to say not laptops after some confusion a few years back with MBX. The only edit I made was spelling corrections and those links. The edit as well was only 12mins after I posted and hours before you posted. You just missed read what I typed or didn’t see the asterisk. Not a big deal we all make mistakes or miss something at times.




“i like some others on here have assumed you were talking about laptops. it may very well be possible on a tiny screen to have AA without a cost, but not on a large scale like a laptop monitor.”
It was clear I wasn’t talking about laptops and it’s very possible to have FSAA without cost on a laptop monitor or oven PC monitor. The same method applies to small screens and big. If you have free bandwidth you don’t have any speed loss from using multisampling FSAA.

It’s very easy to get Free FSAA on a Tile-based render. All PowerVR cards have had lots of free bandwidth so all PowerVR cards with multisampling don’t suffer any FPS loss for FSAA.





“funny you should mention the Ngage from nokia... i suggest you have a read of this as they are not planning on using powerVR in their mobile devices for much longer.”
Please re-read it. First they say “ATI may have scored a major design win” they where guessing, nothing was announced and something would have been by now. It turns out most of the deal was just software. Also they mention Imageon but why would Nokia swap to a slower and less feature rich chip like the Imageon?

Then there are the recent things like Nokia always use OMAP from TI whom just announced are staying with PowerVR for OMAP 3. Do you really think Nokia are going to dump TI and OMAP? I cannot see that partneship breaking up.



Back to Intel. Don’t forgot Imgtech is an IP company this 5mill is a lot of money for an IP company. Imgtech will not be producing any cards they just do the research and come up with the IP.
 
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“What is an IP company? Is your webhost having problems, since your sig links are offline.”
An IP company (intellectual property) is a company that makes and sell IP. Basically they come up with a chip design or something other fancy technology and sell it to anyone who wants to buy it. In exchange Imgtech get royalties on things sold containing there technology (IP). It’s perfectly possible that one day ATI or Nvidia might licence some IP of Imgtech and use it. Highly unlikely mind you but possible.


For example the Kyro 2 was a PowerVR series 3 chip the IP was sold to a company called STMicro who produced, advertised and sold the Kyro II.

Hrrm I didn’t explain that very well. Imgtech come up with IP and licence it out to other companies to use. If that doesn’t explain it well enough someone else has to have a go.

As for those complaints about my quoteing I am just going but it down to a few fussy people. I had no complaints for the first 3 years of posting on this forum. Only this year. Also strangely no complaints in the other forums sections only 3Dcards.

As for the links in my sig there is some sort of problem. I don’t own or pay for the hosting so not sure what’s wrong.
 
“if you had another profile it begs the question as to why you are not using it.”
The same reason everyone else stopped using there original accounts. The big forum wipe when all accounts got deleted. I did stop posting just before the wipe and PowerVR talks died down, a few years later I came back as found my account delted but PowerVR started to get interesting again and PPU’s are interesting so I signed back up.
 
The wipe back in October 2002 was a full wipe and that’s when I lost my account and didn’t remake until this year. You will not find any members older then that.
 
Ok you asked nicely. I will not stop using quote bold but I will try to use it less often and add the names in of whom I am quoting. If you see me drifting back to using it every post give me a friendly nudge please.

Its not easy to break a 10+ year habit.
 
I wish that was true about free FSAA on the Kyro II. It would be if it would did multisampling but it only did supersampling which meant the Kyro II took a 50% performance hit for x2 FSAA and 75% performance hit for x4 FSAA
 
“On a different note, i was under the impression that tile based rendering was done by all gfx cards now?“
PowerVR cards use Tile based rendering and deferred rending its using both together that make then unique. Apart from Intel I dont thinkg anyone else use's Tile based rendering.





“i believe ati call it Hyper-Z or something.”
Not far off Hyper_Z something, cannot remember its precise name is like a mini version of deferred rendering. It removes things that do not need to be rendered. Hyper-z remove something like 20% of hidden objects compared to about 99% for differed rendering. Please don’t quote that 20% number its most likely wrong as I am not sure precisely what the new ATI cards remove.

A bit to simplified this next bit so not 100% accurate but differed rending removes hidden objects so they don’t get rendered, saving filtrate for objects you can see.

Tile based rendering splits the screen into about lots of tiles and renders each tile one at a time. It does some fancy stuff so it needs far less bandwidth then rendering the full screen at one this also saves memory.

More info here http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=1253&p=4 and if someone wants whitepapers explained it in more detail I can dig up some links







“So if this so called 'intellectual property' of Power VR could be used by the 2 major PC,GPU companies of today,would we have more advanced graphics solutions at our fingertips than are currently available?”
That’s debatable and also depends on what you class as advanced. I hate using cars but it’s the easiest way to explain. I think of Nivida as brute force less elegant solution. They have lots of raw power kind of like an America cars. While PowerVR have more elegant solutions with less raw power like European cars.

Which is better depends where you’re driving. On the wide open long straight roads in America brute force is king. For the narrow winding roads in Europe the more elegant solution with less power is king.

Same for games if the game has little overdraw brute force is faster. If the game has lots of overdraw PowerVR’s method is faster.

One drown side to IP company’s is it graphic card cycles are longer. There are no short 6 or even 9 months cycles with PowerVR. Its normally a year or longer between cards.
 
Moeks wrote:
“Pottsey: This is a slightly off topic question but are you the same Pottsey who posts frequently in the Eve-Online forums and was/is a major advocate for passive shield tanking? ...”

Yes that’s me. I did get into PowerVR before Eve. Wish I joined Eve when it started not soon after. But still a great game even if you join late.

is this any better quoting wise or should I try it another way? I just figured who ever I am quoting could recognise there own text so no name was needed. Didn’t think about it from someone else’s point of view.



Which is better with or without the extra line space. Below without the space.

Moeks wrote:
“Pottsey: This is a slightly off topic question but are you the same Pottsey who posts frequently in the Eve-Online forums and was/is a major advocate for passive shield tanking? ...”
Yes that’s me. I did get into PowerVR before Eve. Wish I joined Eve when it started not soon after. But still a great game even if you join late.
 
Boogle I have been wondering are you the Boogle Oggle I was to talk to years back? I believe you started a website based around the same name and we talked about it years back. I know I got that name wrong as well, it was along those lines. Did you used to have a different name or have I got the wrong person or perhaps remembering wrongly.
 
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