Mediatek announces MT6577 platform for sub-$200 smartphones

Great news from IMG's partner today with the availability of MT6577, an integrated platform (apps processor+3G/HSPA modem) running Android 4.0, featuring Power VR SGX 531.

There is no doubt this platform will take large market share in China (from Qualcomm mainly) and result in Mediatek becoming the 2nd largest volume partner for Imagination  (Apple no.1 of course). 

This comes just a few days after the Mediatek takeover of MStar (another IMG partner) was announced, something which has the potential to accelerate IMG's move to becoming no.1 graphics IP supplier in the DTV SoC market (instead of Mali) over the coming 12-18 months.

Full PR:

HSINCHU, Taiwan, June 27, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- MediaTek Inc., a leading fabless semiconductor company for wireless communications and digital multimedia solutions, today announced the availability of the MT6577, a dual-core platform developed specifically for sub-$200 smartphones, the fastest growing segment of the global smartphone market. The MediaTek MT6577 features a dual 1GHz Cortex(TM)-A9 application processor from ARM, a PowerVR(TM) Series5 SGX GPU (graphics processing unit) from Imagination Technologies, MediaTek's proven 3G/HSPA modem, and runs the latest Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" operating system. By integrating a dual-core application processor architecture widely deployed in the majority of today's premium smartphones, the MT6577 boosts application and browser performance by up to 40% compared to single-core platforms, bringing unprecedented levels of user experience to mid- and entry-level smartphones.

"MediaTek's existing HSPA smartphone platforms - the MT6573 and MT6575 - have been extremely well-received by customers and consumers worldwide, and are currently shipping with major international brands such as Lenovo, TCL/Alcatel, and other top tier Chinese OEMs," said Ching-Jiang Hsieh, President of MediaTek. "The MT6577 adds the next level of performance and enhanced user experience to the MediaTek smartphone family, delivering enhanced user interactivity, mobile connectivity and rich multi-media experience previously only available on high-end devices. Consumers everywhere will now benefit from the affordable, high-performance devices enabled by the MT6577. MediaTek is proud to be in the vanguard of companies enabling the democratization of smartphones."

"Dual-core processors account for over 20% of current smartphone processor shipments, with these devices being mostly in the premium segment and addressed by standalone application processors. MediaTek's new MT6577, with integrated dual-core processors and 3G/HSPA modem is well suited to bringing similar user experiences to the fast-growing mid and entry smartphone segment which is forecast to grow from under 200 Mu in 2012 to over 500 Mu in 2016," said Stuart Robinson, Director, Handset Component Technologies service at Strategy Analytics.

The MT6577 is designed to deliver rich multimedia experiences, with an 8MP camera, support for up to high-definition 1080p video playback and the ability to support high-resolution displays up to HD720 (1280x720) resolution. The platform also pre-integrates MediaTek's leading 4-in-1 connectivity combo that provides support for dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi, BT4.0, GPS and FM. The MT6577 is pin-to-pin compatible with the previously released MT6575, allowing handset manufacturers to easily produce multiple tiers of devices leveraging a single PCBA hardware development effort.

The MT6577 dual-core platform is currently being incorporated into smartphone devices by MediaTek's leading global customers, and the first smartphone models based on this new chipset are expected to ship commercially in Q3 2012.

Imagination announces superb results

Yesterday, Imagination announced an excellent set of full year results. Highlights below:

Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE: IMG, “Imagination”, “the Group”), a leading multimedia, communications and embedded processor technology company, today announces results for the year to 30 April 2012.

Financial highlights

• Group revenue up 30% to £127.5m (2011: £98.0m)
  • Technology revenues increased 41% to £98.2m (2011: £69.8m)
    • Royalty revenue up 55% to £63.8m (2011: £41.3m)
    • Licensing revenues up 21% to £34.4m (2011: £28.5m)
  • Pure revenues of £29.3m (2011: £28.3m)
    • Strong overseas growth (36% of revenues now international) offsetting tough UK retail environment
• Adjusted pre-tax profit* up 53% to £36.8m (2011: £24.0m)
• Reported pre-tax profit up 74% to £28.5m (2011: £16.4m)
• Adjusted earnings per share* up 39% to 11.0p (2011: 7.9p**)
• Reported earnings per share 7.9p (2011: 7.7p)
• Cash balance increased to £66.3m (2011: £49.4m)

* The reconciliation from reported results to adjusted results is set out in Note 3.
** Using normalised tax rate of 26%

Business highlights

Technology business

Royalties and design wins

• Partner chips shipped up 33% to 325m units (2011: 245m), substantial acceleration in H2 to 202m units (H2 2011: 138m)
• Significant volume shipments in mobile phone, tablets/mobile computing, PMP (personal media players), game consoles, TV/STB (Set-Top Box), digital radio and automotive markets
• Strong growth in chip design wins with 136 active partner chips (2011: 115); 60 in production (2011: 48)
• Average royalty rate maintained due to enhancing mix of IP, despite significant volume ramp-up and strong lower-end handset growth

Licensing

• Maintained strong licensing activities across all of our IP
  • Several new partners added including Actions Semiconductor, Allwinner, Compound Photonics, HiSilicon, Huawei, Ingenic, MStar, Qualcomm, Ricoh, Rockchip, ZTE
  • Many new and extended agreements with existing partners including CSR, Frontier Silicon, Intel, MediaTek, Realtek, Renesas, Samsung, Sigma, Sony, ST, ST-Ericsson, Sunplus, Toumaz
  • Significant new partner engagements and license closure in China
• 30 important customers involving 49 silicon IP core licenses - almost 50% up over the last year
  • Addressing all markets - mobile phone, tablets/mobile computing, TV/STB, PMP/Camera, in-car navigation/dashboard and industrial/enterprise equipment
  • Including graphics, video, display, broadcast/connectivity and processor silicon IP cores, as well as V.VoIP technologies
• Continued active pipeline of prospects across all IP families

Pure business

• Continued softness in UK revenues offset by momentum in overseas growth
  • Ongoing DAB adoption worldwide and growing demand for Pure's connected audio
• Continued strategic development and pathfinding role
  • Focus on development of technologies for digital broadcast, connected devices and Cloud solutions
• Key recent new products launched
• New Pure wireless streaming products including new flagship Sensia and first Airplay enabled product
• Second generation Highway in-car digital radio and audio adapter launched with Halfords & OEM agreement with Alpine
• Cloud-based on-demand music service launched in the UK with other services and regions adding soon

Hossein Yassaie, Chief Executive, commented:

“We have maintained our momentum and seen another strong year of financial and strategic progress which has fundamentally strengthened our overall position. The excellent growth in licensing partnerships, which expanded across all our IP families, and significant volume ramp-up resulted in a material jump in full-year revenues and profits.

“Our ‘smart’ technologies are being adopted more widely across new and existing partners, creating a solid base for continued momentum in future volume growth making our stated goal of around 1bn annual unit shipment by 2016 a realistic objective.

“Despite the current slow-down in consumer spending, Pure continues to effectively showcase and help to drive key strategic connectivity technologies. We expect to also see a financial improvement in this division over the medium term, driven by international markets and new product opportunities.

“Despite the global economic environment, over 1 million devices are now being shipped with our IP daily. We remain very confident of our continued good progress, given the growing demand across our IP families, the growth in design wins across a widening range of end user markets and the momentum in our partners’ chip volume.”

END

Full report is here:

http://www.imgtec.com/corporate/newsdetail.asp?NewsID=687

Analyst meeting presentation slides are here:

http://www.imgtec.com/corporate/presentations/prelims12/index.asp

Audio broadcast (you have to register) is here (seems to work better on Safari and iPad 2/iPhone 4S imo)

http://www.imgtec.com/corporate/investor%5Faudio/investor_login.asp?restricted=true&accessdenied=%2Fcorporate%2Finvestor%5Faudio%2Findex%2Easp

Some of the bear analysts came up with  a new angle of attack: over-reliance on one customer (ie. Apple), as if being the sole supplier to iOS devices (for many years to come) is a bad thing.

Jen-Hsun , Warren East, and Paul Jacobs would give their right arm for the iOS graphics slot (imho). 

The bull analysts have updated their estimates and I will update the Broker estimates in due course (there's quite a few !) .

There was special emphasis on IMG's success in the A/V/TV markets and as I said in earlier posts, IMG will soon (12-24 months imo) overhaul Mali's no.1 position in the DTV market - especially when the Apple HDTV arrives.

Congratulations to HY and his brilliant team at IMG (TKS, Susi, John Metcalfe, Dave McBrien and the hundreds of top-notch engineers) on these results. Next stop...half a billion units.

Imagination announces 2 new Power VR Series 6 Rogue cores

With just a few days to go before the Final Results, IMG made a number of announcements today. Of particular interest was this one:

Imagination Technologies, a leading multimedia technologies company, announces the latest IP cores in its ground-breaking PowerVR Series6 GPU core family.

The PowerVR G6230 and G6430 GPU IP cores are the latest in a growing family of PowerVR Series6 GPU cores and deliver high compute efficiency while minimising power and bandwidth requirements. 

Following on from the G6200 and G6400 cores, the PowerVR G6230 and G6430 offer two further design points in the Series6 family, which now includes two ‘two-cluster’ and two ‘four-cluster’ IP cores.

PowerVR G6200 and G6400 are designed to deliver the best performance at the smallest area possible for two and four cluster architectures respectively, while the PowerVR G6230 and G6430 ‘go all out’, adding incremental extra area for maximum performance whilst minimising power consumption.

All ‘Rogue’ architecture cores deliver a power / performance ratio unmatched by competitor solutions, without compromising on feature set. 

Says Tony King-Smith, VP marketing, Imagination: “With the four cores announced so far PowerVR Series6 can target a wide range of markets and requirements. PowerVR Series6 has already set a new benchmark for high performance, ultra-low power GPU cores. With G6200, G6230, G6400 and G6430 we deliver power, performance and area that fits the wide range of differentiated designs our licensing partners want to create.”

PowerVR Series6 is based on the highly scalable ‘Rogue’ architecture and further cores will be announced to deliver the widest range of performance for licensing partners seeking to deploy the industry’s leading graphics IP solution with the optimal intersection of product differentiation and the shortest time to market.

Inside Rogue 

Based on a scalable number of compute clusters, the PowerVR Rogue architecture is designed to target the requirements of a growing range of demanding markets from mobile to the highest performance embedded graphics including smartphones, tablets, PC, console, automotive and TV. Using these arrays of programmable computing elements PowerVR G62xx and G64xx deliver high compute power efficiency while minimising power and bandwidth requirements. The PowerVR G62xx and G64xx, have two and four compute clusters respectively. 

PowerVR Series6 GPU cores are designed to offer computing performance exceeding 100GFLOPS (gigaFLOPS) and reaching the TFLOPS (teraFLOPS) range enabling high-level graphics performance from mobile through to high-end compute and graphics solutions. Rogue cores are specified to ensure the fill rates required for the latest smartphones, tablets and TVs, as well as the multiple screen support demanded by the automotive industry.

Rogue meets requirements for compute APIs including OpenCL 1.x and Renderscript Compute, delivering an optimal balance of performance versus power consumption for mobile and embedded devices. All members of the Series6 family are designed to support all features of the latest graphics APIs including the next generation of the OpenGL ES API*, OpenGL 3.x/4.x, and DirectX10 with certain family members extending their capabilities to full WHQL-compliant DirectX11.1 functionality.

The PowerVR Series6 family delivers a significant portfolio of new technologies and features, including: advanced scalable compute cluster architecture; high efficiency compression technology including lossless image and parameter compression and the widely respected PVRTC2™ texture compression; an enhanced scheduling architecture; dedicated housekeeping processor based on Imagination’s Meta technology; and a new generation Tile Based Deferred Rendering architecture. These features combine to produce a highly latency tolerant architecture that consumes the lowest memory bandwidth in the industry while delivering the best performance per mm2 and per mW.

END

Imagination also recently announced further collaboration with TSMC:

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120615PR204.html

GPU IP vendor Imagination Technologies has announced a collaboration with TSMC to ensure that licensees of all of Imagination's IP cores can optimize speed, area and power consumption on TSMC's most-advanced 28nm and below processes.

Imagination is already a member of TSMC's Soft-IP Alliance program. The IP licensor said the announcement is made as part of its closer relationship with the foundry partner.

Imagination's IP core families in this collaboration include PowerVR graphics, PowerVR video and display, Ensigma communications, and Meta processors. Meta is a 32-bit hardware multi-threaded processor architecture.

"Many of our licensees rely on TSMC to provide them with leading edge low power, high performance silicon foundry capabilities. This strengthening of our relationship with TSMC reflects our determination to deliver the best possible SoC solutions on the latest silicon processes for our SoC IP licensing partners," said Tony King-Smith, VP marketing, Imagination. "We believe this initiative will ensure that Imagination's licensees to continue to push the boundaries of what is possible for future generations of advanced SoCs."

In addition, Imagination noted that the firm has grown its licensee portfolio in Taiwan. Through the support of its Taiwan-based partners including MediaTek, MStar, Realtek, Sunplus and SiS, Imagination is able to reach the local OEM and ODM companies in China, the GPU IP licensor said.

For instance, many China-based OEMs have developed MediaTek-based phones. MediaTek has licensed Imagination's PowerVR Series6 for its smartphone processors.

In China, Imagination has expanded its local licensee base to include HiSilicon, Ingenic and Rockchip, the IP vendor revealed. Imagination is also partnering with well-known chip suppliers such as TI, whose processors adopted by China's OEMs including Lenovo and Huawei.

And to respond to its growing business in Asia, Imagination has moved to increase its local engineering and sales support, China and Taiwan, the UK-based IP supplier noted.

END

ARM recently had an analyst investor day, during which they gave the impression (imo) that they were winning the battle for GPU in the China/Taiwan territory. A quick look at some of the names in the above article would suggest otherwise. 

Mediatek re-iterated its estimate of smartphone chips at the AGM earlier of 75m for the full-year and these are IMG'd, so it is quickly becoming our no.2 chip shipper (after Apple of course). It should not be too long before the IMG'd TV chips from market leaders Mediatek and MStar (currently Mali) also start shipping. 

So things are looking great for IMG in China/Taiwan with much more to come. We should get more information on 19th June in the Full Year statement from IMG and the presentation slides.