IMG

IMG

Monday, 14 November 2011

Renesas signs up for Rogue

A 'biggie' announced today by IMG:

Renesas Electronics and Renesas Mobile License Imagination Technologies' PowerVR Series6 Graphics Technologies

London, UK and TOKYO, Japan, November 14, 2011--Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE: IMG; "Imagination"), a leader in System-on-Chip Intellectual Property (SoC IP), Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723; "Renesas"), a premier provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, and Renesas Mobile Corporation ("Renesas Mobile"), a wholly owned subsidiary of Renesas Electronics and an innovative supplier of advanced cellular semiconductor solutions and platforms, today announced that Imagination and Renesas Electronics have signed a multiuse license agreement for IP from Imagination's PowerVR Series6 'Rogue' graphics family.

Renesas Mobile, an innovative supplier of advanced cellular semiconductor solutions and platforms, will initially deploy Imagination's technologies in its cellular platforms for high-performance smartphones, tablets, and in-car infotainment, and the technology will also be used by Renesas Electronics in its SoC portfolio to address additional consumer markets.

The PowerVR Series6 GPU family, codenamed 'Rogue', enables unrivalled GFLOPS performance per mm2 and per mW for all APIs. These will enable Renesas Mobile's future products to deliver advanced graphics performance including highly featured user interfaces, ultra-fast and exciting gaming experiences and rich applications that exceed the expectations and desires of users.

PowerVR Series6 delivers not only a clear technology advantage and exceptional roadmap, driven by one of the largest teams of graphics engineers in the world, but also an extensive ecosystem of third party developers which has created hundreds of thousands of applications optimised for PowerVR enabled devices to date.

Toshihiro Hattori, Vice President of SoC Business Division, Renesas Mobile Corporation, said:

"Advanced graphics performance is a key factor in creating intuitive User Interfaces, which are becoming increasingly important for smartphone and future automotive infotainment systems. Imagination Technologies is a long-standing IP partner of Renesas Mobile and Renesas Electronics for advanced graphics used in SoC products. The new PowerVR Series6 will enable us to provide attractive solutions for many markets and users."

Tony King-Smith, VP marketing, Imagination Technologies, said:

"We are delighted to continue our strategic partnership with Renesas with this multiuse agreement for PowerVR Series6. Renesas is a long-standing partner of Imagination in graphics, and has consistently delivered outstanding SoCs with advanced and compelling PowerVR-based graphics capabilities. This latest expansion of our partnership will help both companies to further drive and exploit the latest graphics trends."

Under the terms of its licensing arrangements Imagination receives license fees and royalty revenues on shipment of chips incorporating Imagination's IP.
END


Back in the day, Renesas (and TI with OMAP 2) were pretty much first out of the gate with 3D HW acceleration for mobiles (NTT DoCoMo of Japan) - that laid the foundation for game-changers like the Nokia N95, and the rest is history. 
Renesas have been a hugely loyal and supportive partner for IMG ever since that time. Great to see it continuing with Rogue.
Also interesting to note that Rogue is licensed both by Renesas Electronics and Renesas Mobile, I guess we will see the significance of this in due course.

So we now have 4 disclosed Rogue licensees (Mediatek, TI, ST-E, Renesas) and 3 undisclosed (2 of which will be Apple and Intel of course). I would guess Sony is now favourite for the mystery 3rd undisclosed licensee but who knows ? We do know (from AGM) that demand for Rogue is very strong, but IMG have to carefully manage this with regard to level of engineering support etc.

Well done IMG. 



No comments:

Post a Comment