SGX543MP2 in action

Amazingly, the SGX543MP2 can display 1920x1080 on the TV, and also run 1024x768 on the iPad2 screen at the same time.

From http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-real-racing-2-hd-1080p-comes-to-ios


Courtesy of Rob Evans

Real Racing 2 HD: 1080p comes to iOS
April 29th, 2011

A fever pitch of speculation surrounded the recent launch of iPad 2, with Apple managing to keep a tight lid on the technical make-up of the new device right up to the launch event. There we saw Epic Games' excellent Infinity Blade showcased with a level of performance and graphical finesse that outstripped the same game running on the original version of Apple's tablet.

While it's clear that Epic was given access to prototype versions of the new device, most developers were left as much in the dark as the rest of us. Even basic info on the specs of the revamped machine was carefully guarded, presenting some serious challenges to developers champing at the bit to support the new hardware from launch.

Flight Control developer Firemint was especially eager to brings its new racing sequel, Real Racing 2 HD, across to iPad 2 as quickly as possible.

"In anticipating the iPad 2 release, we were actually working with a matrix of different possibilities for what it might be. As time went by and we heard rumours we would adjust the probabilities in each configuration," Firemint CEO Rob Murray tells us.

"We worked on basically two versions for iPad 2. One was built for about 25 per cent to 50 per cent performance increase, the other was the 'hit it out of the park' kind of performance increase. When we saw the keynote we switched gears rapidly to the 'hit it out of the park' version that meant that we were finishing off a new graphics set that we had been working on."

£5 share price barrier breached

A long time coming, and its been a while since the last time, but IMG share price finally breached the five pounds per share barrier today. Great way to end the Financial Year, and we hope a few last minute licence deals have been signed along the way.

Two from Samsung

Samsung Infuse 4G (AT&T), uses 1.2GHz Hummingbird (SGX 540):

http://www.mobilewhack.com/samsung-infuse-4g-coming-to-walmart-next-month-for-178-88/

Samsung 4G Droid Charge (Verizon),uses 1GHz Hummingbird

http://www.itproportal.com/2011/04/22/verizon-offer-samsungs-4g-droid-charge/

Plenty of life left in the Hummingbird yet it seems.
The equivalent Samsung apps processor for tablets, S5PV210, has recently been showing up in multiple Chinese manufacturer designs.

Apple Q2 CC comments

IMG-related snippets from the (yet again) forecast-busting quarter:

Peter Oppenheimer:

'We sold 9 million iPods compared to 10.9 million in the year ago quarter. Though lower year-over-year, total iPod sales were ahead of our expectations with iPod touch continuing to count for over half of all iPods sold'.
'We were thrilled to have sold a record 18.6 million iPhones compared to 8.8 million in the previous March quarter. '
'Turning to iPad. We continue to be thrilled with its momentum. We sold 4.7 million iPads during the March quarter, launching iPad 2 in U.S. on March 11 and in 25 additional markets on March 25. Customer enthusiasm has been tremendous for iPad 2 and we're working hard to get it into the hands of customers as quickly as possible. '
'We sold every iPad 2 that we can make during the quarter and would have liked to end the quarter with more channel inventory. '
'Combining iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, we reached just under 189 million cumulative iOS device sales through the end of the March quarter'

Timothy Cook
Rich, it's Tim. In terms of iPhone, we did actually very well everywhere. I'd call out 2 places that -- where it was just off the charts. The U.S. grew 155% year-over-year, obviously, adding Verizon and beginning to offer iPhone to their enormous customer base was key in that. However, as you heard from AT&T's announcement this morning, AT&T did extremely well during the quarter. So the U.S. as a geography grew at 155% and that's about 3x IDC's forecast of growth for the smartphone market, which was about 48%. Also, we continued to be on a tear in China. Greater China saw iPhone sales being up over 3x, about 200 -- almost 250%. And this catapulted revenue for the first half or first fiscal half in Greater China to just under $5 billion, which is up almost 4x year-over-year. And so we're extremely happy with how we're doing in China.

'And so I think the key point here is that I'm extremely pleased with the progress that we were making on the manufacturing ramp. We have gotten off to a materially better start and produced a lot more units than we did on the original ramp of the first iPad. And when we're so confident with our ability to supply that we've already put on 25 additional countries at the end of March, and we'll be placing on 13 more next week and we'll do even more as we stepped through the quarter.'

END
Phenomenal numbers once again, looks like we can expect huge iPad 2 volume in the Q3 figures.
A very positive week for IMG on the TI(OMAP), Intel and Apple fronts. Full steam ahead.....

Intel Q1 CC comments

Intel crushed Q1 estimates last night. Here are selected IMG-related (though of course never mentioned by name) comments from the CC:

Paul Otellini:

'We also launched Oak Trail just last week, which is a platform designed specifically for tablets. We are seeing very good design momentum with Oak Trail across multiple operating systems. Over the course of this year, Intel will have tablet platforms that run Windows, Android and MeeGo.
We remain committed to success in the Smartphone segment, and we're actively working with a large number of handset manufacturers and carriers around the world on met field-based designs.
Overall, we begin 2011 with great momentum. We've added McAfee and the Wireless Division of Infineon to our portfolio, and have ambitious plans for both acquisitions going forward. We are investing and developing new products for phones and tablets, and are turning our advantages in Moore's Law and computer technology into breakthrough products for these segments. All of our major product segments are growing, and these new segments are expected to add to that growth momentum. '

'Well, you'll see quite a bit of tablet demonstration to Computex. If you notice what we did at IDF in Beijing last week, that was -- there were a lot of tablet-centric announcements there around MeeGo and Windows and Android. And so we're heads down on a number of designs on tablets on all 3 of those operating systems where we see the Android code, Honeycomb version of Android source code from Google, and we're actively doing the port on that and expect to be able to ramp those machines over the course of this year for a number of customers. In terms of phones, obviously, we lost Nokia, which took a lot of wind out of the sales for phones this year. We've redirected those resources onto a number of other major accounts, focusing on carriers who want their own devices and also on handset manufacturers. They're all based on Medfield, which is, I think, still the first 32-nanometer phone apps processor in the industry. And quite frankly, the limit in terms of them getting to market is going to be the interoperability testing of the networks at this point in time. So I think I would be very disappointed if you didn't see Intel-based phones for sale 12 months from now.'

'In terms of x86 versus ARM, it is not just about the core as much as we would like it to be, and I guess as much as the ARM guys would like it to be. It's about the core, the overall capability of the system on Chip, the things you put around it, the graphics, the com subsystems, the media processing subsystems and the overall power envelope relative to the performance that you can deliver of the SoC. So the Intel advantage that we see going forward is the combination of very robust computer architecture that can scale, the ability to bring on very high performance graphics and media processing, and now a wide array of comps architectures that we can bring in, and taking advantage of the world's best silicon. When you add those together, I think it gives us a very strong value proposition in this market. I'd also point out that all of the major operating systems in phones and smartphones are written at a high-level such as they're cross-platform and portable. And so it is easier for people to move from ARM to Intel or ARM to ARM than it has been in the past in the Windows.'

END

Apple's turn tonight.....

TI Q1 :OMAP comments

(Thanks Sweenoid)

Ron Slaymaker:
Wireless revenue will increasingly be driven by our core product areas of connectivity and OMAP applications processors. We continue to be encouraged by our design win momentum in both areas. In applications processors, we introduced our OMAP 5 processor in the quarter, a multi-core product based on ARM's latest Cortex-A15 core. The key to OMAP 5 is that we will again push the envelope on both performance and power efficiency. Many of our competitors in this market try to attain our leadership performance metrics without fully appreciating the critical importance of power efficiency to mobile applications.
We have also continued to win a broad swath of smartphones, tablets, eReaders, personal navigation devices and other mobile computing applications with our OMAP 3 and OMAP 4 products, setting the stage for strong OMAP growth over the next few quarters as these programs ramp into production.

Tristan Gerra - Robert W. Baird & Co. Incorporated
Could you give us an update on the market share you believe you had with OMAP 4? And in terms of the market share gains that you expect over the next few quarters, is that relative to previous OMAP products? Or is it relative to the competition? And if so, why do you say you were getting share in that space?
Ron Slaymaker
Okay. So I don't have a share number for you, specifically. But there's probably lots of third-party people that make their living at trying to make that assessment. So I guess I would just reference you in that direction. In terms of gains that we're making and what gives us confidence that we will see share gains, it's as simple as looking at the pipeline of wins that we have under way. And to some degree, Tristan, it depends upon how you define the market, and I don't mean that cute. What I mean, though, is that our view of mobile computing and the opportunity there is a pretty broad definition of the opportunities. So it includes tablets and it includes smartphones, but it also includes areas like data terminals. The guys in the brown truck that deliver the package to you that pull a little data terminal out and record the delivery and has you sign on the pad, we view that as an OMAP, a potential OMAP application. In fact, we have wins in that space. So again, a very broad definition of the opportunity for mobile computing, and by no means does that diminish our enthusiasm for OMAP in smartphones and in tablets. In fact, I would say both of those are must-win areas, but we also have a much broader definition where we're going to be able to take that same OMAP technology and put it into a lot of different areas: eReaders, personal navigation devices I mentioned previously are all areas where today, we have OMAP design wins in that pipeline that I'm referring to that these aren't demo projects that somebody did at a trade show. These are production programs that we have in development for customers that will be going into production in 2011. And so there's always uncertainty as to how much success a particular product will have out in the marketplace. But in terms of the quality of the customers, the size of the potential opportunities, we are quite confident that it's going to translate to very solid market share gains for us in that market.
END

 

Intel reports tonight, followed by Apple tomorrow.

Intel IDF Beijing

The webcasts are up here:

http://newsroom.intel.com/docs/DOC-1968

Oaktrail (for tablets) got it's official debut and Cedar Trail was also previewed (for netbooks and entry-level desktops). It is not known if Cedarview is IMG or not at this stage.
Medfield and Cloverview were described as the nex-gen 'tablet processors' (no smartphone mentions) with more details later this year. Medfield is almost certainly SGX (core not known) but there is little information about Cloverview yet.
Having pretty much missed the current smartphone/tablet wave Intel seem to be focussed on China to gain traction/volume in these two very important markets.

Beets and Harold interviewed

(Thanks to Rob Evans)

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/digitalfoundry-powervr-tech-interview

Tech Focus: IMG on PowerVR mobile graphics Weeks on from the iPad 2 launch, the full graphical power of the new tablet is finally coming into focus - and it's frankly monstrous, a massive statement of intent from Apple on its plans for the games market. Apple's new A5 processor features a dual core PowerVR SGX 543 – the same graphics tech that's set to be featured in the forthcoming Sony NGP, the difference being that the new PlayStation portable will double the core count, bringing an unprecedented amount of graphical power to the mobile space. UK-based Imagination Technologies is the engineering force behind the PowerVR graphics tech: in this interview, director of PR David Harold and business development manager Kristof Beets talk frankly about its current range of mobile processors and their capabilities, the importance of its support for DirectX and Open GL standards and discusses some of the custom features found in their GPUs. They also go into depth on the scalability of their hardware and look forward to the emergence of the ARM-based version of Windows. Finally, if you thought the performance increase between the iPad and iPad 2 GPUs was impressive, the final question we put to Imagination should help put some perspective on that... Q: What are the key rendering differences between the PowerVR architecture and the approach taken by NVIDIA and AMD? IMG: PowerVR graphics technology is based on a concept called Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR). In contrast to Immediate Mode Rendering (IMR) used by most graphics engines in the PC and games console worlds, TBDR has two components, the first Tile Based Rendering which focuses on keeping data processing on-chip by breaking the screen down into manageable tile sized chunks which can be kept on chip. The second part focuses on minimising the processing required to render an image as early in the processing of a scene as possible, so that only the pixels that actually will be seen by the end user consume processing resources. This approach minimises memory bandwidth and power consumption while improving processing throughput but it is more complex. Q: A lot of people have tried to bring a TBDR solution to market, but only IMG has achieved it. Why do you think the mainstream GPU manufacturers have stuck to their traditional approaches? IMG: Partly because although the idea sounds simple it's actually very hard to do it in practice - especially in such a way that looks like any other renderer to developers. Partly because we have a lot of the fundamental patents. Q: SGX543 is described as a Shader Model 3 part. This is a DirectX standard, but DX doesn't apply to the mobile devices. In contrast the PICA200 in the Nintendo 3DS forgoes PC style design for a design targeting intended use in a handheld. What are the costs and advantages going with a standard born in the PC space? IMG: We target a range of markets from phone through navigation to computing and TV. We aren't a "PC style design" but we do on some of our cores offer DX capability for the computing market - and now for future Windows based mobile devices. The total Series5 and Series5XT portfolio enables the industry's broadest range of performance/area options, from the smallest single pipe SGX520 core up to the 64-pipe SGX543 MP16. All popular APIs and OS are supported by all SGX cores, including OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1, OpenVG 1.1, OpenGL 2.0/3.0 and DirectX 9/10.1 on Symbian, Linux, Android, WinCE/Windows Mobile and Windows 7/Vista/XP. It's essential to understand that standardisation is critical for mass market success since standards enable content and without content hardware is of no use. The highly proprietary approach taken by PICA200 can only work in a closed console environment and even there will limit content availability. Imagination is focused on supporting key industry standards and for mobile parts this is focussed on Khronos APIs such as OpenGL ES but also increasingly the mobile market is crossing over with the PC market with tablet and netbook designs using the same processors and obviously this introduces the requirement for Microsoft DX API support. Also with game engines originating from the PC market coming down into the mobile space, such as the Epic Game Unreal engine, support and compatibility with PC functionality becomes increasingly important as standards and requirements evolve. Q: Given scalability and DirectX based features, will IMG be more actively targeting PC use in future such as netbooks or even desktops? We've not seen much from you since Intel licensed SGX535 for GMA500/GMA600. What about consoles and CE devices? IMG: We already do pretty well in netbooks with devices from Asus, Acer, Sony etc. We also now have a higher end technology for the professional market from Caustic, a new part of Imagination. The scalability of forthcoming PowerVR cores should make them very suitable for the rest of the computing market too. However there's a gap between what we have as licensable IP and what our customers decide to do with that IP. As Windows moves more into mobile and embedded devices due to our experience we are uniquely positioned to support DX (irrespective of the CPU architecture). Q: The PC graphics architecture space has been defined over the past decade by DirectX, and proprietary features of IHV designs have gone largely unexploited. Do you feel this is a good thing for standardisation, or a bad thing limiting innovation? IMG: We believe in open standards, such as DX and OpenGL ES and are very active helping define those standards, working with Microsoft and as a promoter member of Khronos. We do expose some proprietary features via extensions though. When it comes to proprietary features it all depends on what they add for users whether they get used. For example our 2bpp texture compression is very widely used, because it delivers high quality and real efficiency benefits but also for distribution size and memory footprint. It's a thin line to walk between true benefits that developers are eager to use and over-fragmentation of the market which damages developer uptake. For this reason we regularly survey our ecosystem partners to determine their true requirements and interests. Q: Going forward, is SGX going to become more DirectX based, seeking optimal DX performance, or will you look for innovations you can use that would otherwise be missed in the PC space? IMG: We essentially have two strands to our IP - one is focused on OpenGL ES, the other adds some additional silicon area for DX. We plan to continue with that differentiation. That said DX is obviously further ahead in terms of feature set, as is desktop OpenGL, and both are used as references to design the optimised embedded Khronos APIs - so some similarity is to be expected. Over time DX might become more significant if Windows does manage to get a foothold in mobile devices. We've been shipping WHQL compliant DX9 capable mobile parts for several years and have seen an increased interest in licensing of DX10 and DX11 capable parts over the last few months. Q: What are your thoughts on Windows looking to support ARM architecture? What are the opportunities here for IMG? IMG: The combination of an ARM processor and our PowerVR graphics is a bit of a classic in the mobile and embedded space, so if Windows on ARM does take off we'd expect to do well out of it and we're certainly offering a roadmap that will support it very capably. Q: IMG licenses its tech, but as far as we can gather, it doesn't actually fabricate the final hardware. In what ways does IMG work with its licensees in implementing PowerVR into the final designs to ensure best performance? IMG: It varies. We often host engineers from our partners who come to work with us here and we send engineers to work with partners too. We often help with bring-up of new SoC and even with OEMs using those SoCs in end products. On occasion we design entire SoCs, but that's relatively rare. What generally happens is we work very closely with new partners while they get up to speed, but given the kind of partners we have, they are more than capable of picking things up quickly and then doing future designs more autonomously. Q: With the OMAP line and A4/A5 amongst others, we're seeing integration of PowerVR tech into complete SoC solutions. Over and above the advantages in terms of battery life, does a closely integrated CPU/GPU design like this offer any performance advantages? IMG: Almost all use of PowerVR is in an SoC for those very reasons: bandwidth and power efficiency. Historically CPU vendors have tried to push close links between CPUs and GPUs as beneficial but the reality is that for best performance CPU and GPU should be as autonomous as possible. PowerVR SGX is designed to offload the CPU as much as possible with the SGX GPU handling events locally to ensure optimal parallel processing with no direct CPU control impact. Q: Discussing iOS Unreal Engine 3 at GDC 2010, Epic Games mentioned that one of the issues they faced was the lack of support of occlusion queries in OpenGL ES 2.0, limiting their ability to cull unseen polygons. Are you aware of any progress in this area? IMG: It's difficult to comment on upcoming API (and hardware) specifications which have not yet been announced but occlusion queries offer interesting usage cases and are obviously being considered. However it's also important to stress the difference between mobile and PC space, in the PC space it's easy to push a lot of work to the GPU (massive bandwidth, memory and power usage) and let it handle occlusion processing however in the mobile space efficiency is king so trying to remove processing as early as possible (e.g. no submission at all) is even more important so pushing all the workload to the GPU might be less efficient than advanced high-level culling on the CPU side. Still, over time such balance points will shift and even in the mobile space occlusion processing on the GPU will become more efficient over time. Q: Now seems to be the time where key IMG partners are transitioning across from the SGX535 onto the SGX543 multi-core products - aside from the multi-core angle, what are the key enhancements you've made to the basic architecture itself? IMG: Our Series5XT architecture (SGX543/544/554) is a significant mid-life update to the Series5 architecture (SGX520/530/531/535/540) which was driven based on market and customer feedback. Key in this feedback was increased interest in compute performance both for GP-GPU via OpenCL but also for higher-quality pixels via more complex shaders as a result we doubled the floating point performance per pipeline in the newer cores while maintaining efficiency via co-issue (dual instruction) capabilities. Additionally there was an increased interest in compositing User Interfaces and as a result we added dedicated hardware for YUV formats to enable optimal integration with video and camera image streaming. Most of the other changes are much lower level and focused on improving the efficiency of the design including both improved performance and further reduced bandwidth usage - a specific area of focus has been anti-aliasing and polygon throughput. Q: What is your approach to scalability in SGX543? Are we literally looking at 2x the performance as you move from single to dual cores and upwards? IMG: Yes, graphics cores are inherently parallel processors which means that they work on data independently (one pixel does not impact the processing of another pixel) which means that performance can be scaled near linear compared to CPUs where adding more cores often gives a very low return (data does depend on the processing of other data elements). It's important to note that SGX543 offers true and complete load-balance based scaling of performance across both geometry processing and pixel processing workloads - many other designs only scale pixel processing leading to unbalanced designs. Basically the hardware splits all processing tasks (geometry, pixels, GP-GPU) up into small batches which are assigned to GPU cores on demand - this results in high efficiency and avoids impact by hotspots since even if one core is very busy with a complex area of the screen the other cores will continue to process the rest of the screen. Obviously this is also designed to avoid increases in bandwidth usage per frame between multi-core and single-core processing. Q: SGX543 scales up to 16 cores - what kinds of real-life applications did you have in mind for this top-end iteration of the technology? IMG: Anything demanding performance: console, computing etc. Q: Is the architecture flexible enough to allow for the GPU cores to carry out non-graphics based tasks? What sort of applications can you see here? IMG: Absolutely. SGX already has OpenCL conformance and all SGX parts are OpenCL capable. There's all kinds of things that you can use that for from game-world physics to image processing and enhancement. Q: What anti-aliasing modes are supported in PowerVR architecture and what are the associated performance costs? Can we expect high IQ (4x MSAA) on PowerVR SGX543 MP4 as being commonplace at a 960x540 resolution? IMG: As mentioned before anti-aliasing (AA) was one of the key focus areas for Series5XT and the impact on performance is as low as possible without sacrificing image quality. We fully expect that AA will be enabled for the majority of content going forward due its low impact as can be seen on glbenchmark.com where the difference between AA on/off is just small performance fluctuations due to background tasks. Q: Stereoscopic 3D is swiftly being embraced by many different types of media, with games taking the spearhead. Does PowerVR architecture offer any specific advantages that makes 3D easier to work with? IMG: The additional workload required for S3D places significant additional demands on the graphics processor - and PowerVR SGX is more than up to the task. PowerVR SGX graphics acceleration cores are ideally suited to S3D graphics, either using single or multi-processor cores for resolutions up to full 1080p HD, and are capable of supporting all commonly used S3D formats such as frame sequential, side-by-side, top-bottom and interlaced. Using SGX it is possible to quickly upgrade existing 3D content to deliver full S3D, bringing new realism to 3D games and navigation, and exciting new possibilities for user interfaces in a wide range of applications. The PowerVR SGX tile-based deferred rendering architecture is ideally suited to deal with the increased demands of S3D - which include twice the geometry processing workload and commensurate increases in fill/texturing workload. The scalable nature of the SGX architecture and its ability to efficiently support multiple contexts ensure that the best possible S3D user experience can be achieved using SGX powered devices while maintaining SGX's unique low power, high performance credentials. Q: Bearing in mind the importance of battery life, what kind of correlation is there between the clock speed of your GPUs and the fabrication process? Any real life examples you can talk about where die-shrinking the tech has allowed for faster clock speeds with the same power draw? IMG: As Imagination delivers soft IP it can be targeted at any process technologies and this is very much an area where our customers have a lot of knowledge and unique benefits allowing them to differentiate their solutions even when based on the same GPU core. Just as a reference, over time we have seen implementations of the same SGX core going initially from 110MHz to 200MHz and today designs are beyond 400MHz in silicon. Clock frequencies versus higher-end cores is a key choice for our partners and this is often impacted by their silicon process capabilities and benefits and as a result we have seen some customers doubling performance via clock frequency and others have doubled performance by going to a higher end core. Q: Imagination Technologies have experimented with some novel texture formats before. What has happened to this line of technology, and where is it headed? IMG: Imagination has always recognised the need for high quality but low memory footprint and bandwidth textures and images and in the old days we offered Vector Quantization approach for Dreamcast which offered on average 5:1 compression ratio. With PowerVR MBX and SGX we offer PVRTC texture compression down to 4 bits per pixel (8:1) and 2 bits per pixel (16:1) compression for both RGB and RGBA formats. These PVRTC formats are very popular with developers since they offer a much better compression ratio than using PC formats such as DXTC which requires 8 bits per pixel for RGBA formats meaning POWERVR based products can have up to 4 times lower memory footprint and bandwidth usage (= power usage) compared to competing products. Without a doubt this is an area where Imagination will continue to make investments and announcements will be made in due course. Q: Out of interest, Sony says that it has a PowerVR SGX543 MP4+ inside Sony NGP... what does the plus stand for? IMG: That's to indicate the work Sony has done to implement the graphics. What they licensed is a SGX543 MP4. Q: You have other multi-core projects in the pipeline for the series five hardware. What advantages do they have over the SGX543? IMG: In addition to SGX543 we have also announced SGX544 which offers the same performance characteristics but enables fully compliant DX9 Feature Level 9_3 capabilities so basically an extra bump in feature set to meet Microsoft requirements. Also available is the SGX554 which is our first 8 pipeline part (SGX543/544 have 4 processing pipelines) which offers improved compute density for customers focused on GP-GPU and shader processing since a single SGX554 would offer the same compute capability as an SGX543 MP2 but not the same geometry or pixel throughput. This means that SGX554 offers more GFLOPS per mm2 since the design avoid overscaling the geometry and pixel capabilities of the design versus customer requirements - basically we do not believe in "one size fits all" solutions and we thus offer our customers various options. Q: The future of the SGX tech is in your series six "Rogue" platform. What are your overall objectives for this architecture and what kinds of products are you targeting it for? IMG: Imagination's next generation PowerVR Series6 architecture, codenamed "Rogue", has now being licensed by multiple lead partners. Rogue delivers unrivalled GFLOPS per mm2 and per mW for all APIs. We see it crossing a very wide range of markets. ST-Ericsson has announced that its new Nova application processors will include Imagination's next-generation PowerVR Series6 Rogue architecture but we've not really announced much detail of Rogue yet - I'm afraid it's "wait and see". Q: Finally, we see Apple talking about a 9x performance increase from iPad 1 to iPad 2 and benchmarking of the devices sees at least a 4x "real world" boost in GPU performance. With SGX535 as the baseline, what are your performance targets for your hardware going forward. I'm sure I read somewhere you were looking at a 100x increase within five years... IMG: Yes we are. END

Intel DF Beijing

Next Tuesday/Wednesday:
http://www.intel.com/idf/

Looking at the keynotes (http://www.intel.com/idf/keynote-speakers/index.htm) these two on Day 1 should be relevant to IMG :

Title: Devices and the Future of Personal Computing

Speaker: Doug Davis

Title: One World: Embedded with Innovation

Speaker: Ton H. Steenman

Shame (imho) there's no Anand Chandrasekhar as he was obviously an IMG supporter.

Would be good to have an update on Medfield also.

Epic's Tim Sweeney talks iPad 2 graphics and mobile gaming

Interesting interview by Gizmondo with Tim Sweeney of Epic Games:

http://gizmodo.com/#!5789093/the-near+future-of-mobile-gaming-is-going-to-be-pretty-epic


 "I certainly believe 9x," even though they haven't benchmarked the chips. While the iPad 2 isn't at current-gen console levels of power, it delivers enough shader performance that "you can use the high-detail shaders we did during Gears of War."
In the iPad 2, there's "far far more potential in that platform than we're exploiting today." And "iPad 3, 4, 5—we can do what we can on the Xbox 360 and beyond."
Speaking of Android, you're probably wondering why there's no showstopper like Infinity Blade for the platform. Well, wonder no more. Says Sweeney, "When a consumer gets the phone and they wanna play a game that uses our technology, it's got to be a consistent experience, and we can't guarantee that [on Android]. That's what held us off of Android."

(thanks Blueflame)

AGM 2011

IMG's AGM date is set for Friday 26th August 2011 (11 am start)
Should be an absolute corker, see you there....

Broker Estimates/Views

This is kept on Pages and collates numbers from the BBs aswell as our own research.
Only good quality research will be posted of course .No investment advice is intended.
It will be regularly updated once information reaches the public domain.

ST-Ericsson Chip Chief Architect says PVR Rogue 20x faster than Mali 400

Thanks to IPPaws for this:
http://www.itproportal.com/2011/03/31/exclusive-st-ericsson-integrate-nfc-features-its-platforms/

Louis Tannyeres ST-E Chief Chip Architect stated in the interview:

"according to ST-ericsson's own benchmarks, Rogue is up to 20 times faster than Mali graphics which is used in the Exynos 4210 SoC that powers the Samsung Galaxy S II"

This was also mentioned in the original release from ST-E  at MWC  2011 when the A9600 was revealed:
http://www.stericsson.com/press_releases/NovaThor.jsp

On the subject of comparisons a few weeks ago we had this from Anand:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4216/apple-ipad-2-gpu-performance-explored-powervr-sgx543mp2-benchmarked/2

with the SGX 543MP2 core giving the Nvidia Tegra 2 what can only be described as a 'thrashing'.