Tokyo, Japan: Imagination Technologies, a leading multimedia and communications technologies company, says that it believes three key trends will transform the consumer electronics industry and also drive many new vital emerging markets in the next few years. These trends are:
1. Parallel software revolution: high performance, ultra-low power GPUs (graphics processing units) that are best known for powering the user interfaces and games in smartphones today will become the ‘heavy lifting’ processors of tomorrows SoCs. GPUs will become vastly more powerful thanks to their scalable parallel processing capabilities, triggering a mass market parallel software revolution.
2. Connected products have just begun: connectivity to the internet will become a ’must-have’ feature for not only every consumer product, but an emerging array of broader products from healthcare equipment to home automation systems, resulting in billions of new connected products.
3. On-chip RPUs: highly programmable communications capabilities, built using RPUs (radio processing unit) that support a broad range of major global connectivity and broadcast receiver standards, will be essential for the next wave of integration. RPUs will become fully integrated on-chip, just as Imagination predicted would happen for GPUs more than ten years ago, to achieve the high performance, low cost, low power consumption characteristics that consumer and emerging markets will expect as standard.
Say Tony King-Smith, VP marketing, Imagination: “Imagination’s business has always been focused on enabling new markets as well as taking full advantage of discontinuities in the evolution of more established and familiar product categories. Our PowerVR GPU and VPU (video processor) technologies continue to enable profound transformations in user experiences in an ever broader array of consumer and mobile products, resulting in consumers now expecting these same user experiences on every device they use.
“Given our experience in these markets, and our strategic relationships with many of the world’s leading semiconductor, end product, content, applications and internet technology companies, we are increasingly confident that our Ensigma RPU communications IP cores, complemented by our Meta connected processors and Flow connectivity technologies, are destined to power many of the next wave of ubiquitous cloud-connected smart devices and systems throughout the home, car, office and factory, as well as enabling innovative new mobile and embedded products that touch everyone’s lives.”
Full statement is here (quite long)
http://www.imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?NewsID=658The most striking things for me were :
1. We are now up to 8 Rogue licensees ( 4 declared, 4 not yet declared)
2. 70% market share for PowerVR GPUs (attach rate for VPUs is 40%)
3. The continued emphasis on the RPU communication IP cores becoming integrated fully on-chip via Ensigma UCC, Meta and Flow technologies. IMG clearly sees RPU integration into multimedia SoCs as the next big wave (following GPU/VPU integration) - it's early days.
IMG have stated they already have a Tier 1 Semi licensee for Ensigma UCC (in addition to SiS) - strongly suspected by Imagineers to be one of Qualcomm or Broadcom (my money is on the latter) and have strong interest from other leading players. By this time next year we should have a growing list of RPU licensees imo (provided they allow IMG to announce),and analysts will have to factor this in to their estimates (pretty much ignored yet because the Tier 1 has not been named).
Interims are round the corner....
