Another excellent AGM , with wonderful hosting by Susi Barrett (communications director) and her team. Great to catch up and get insight from fellow Imagineers like Dave Sweenoid, Roninja, Ken Hammerd ( superb liveblogging BTW), Blueflame, Brooky, Newtona, Goodgrief, Gez, Rog and co.
Hossein and the top management were quietly confident and assured , leaving attendees in no doubt that IMG are firing on all cylinders but have no intention of resting on their laurels.
I will just add a few bits which came from discussion with management.
Firstly it is worth reiterating that things are just fine with Intel. We'll be in the smartphone solutions whilst the Intel in-house graphics will take the PC/laptop slots - in between that (ie. tablets etc) there will be a mixture of the two.
Regarding the DTV market a couple of new things. Firstly, we will soon see the first results of the MStar SGX 5XT deal from last year, indeed certain large TV companies are specifying the IMG Graphics core instead of the Mali-based MStar cores. Won't be too long before the IMG'd Mediatek DTV cores are also shipping. Due to IMG's excellent relationship with both Mediatek and MStar, the merger is not a concern.
The Mediatek/MStar merger has also meant increased '2nd supplier business' for global DTV no.2 and IMG partner Sigma Designs. Smaller but important suppliers like SiS Inc.are also starting to ship IMG-based smart TV cores
Sony are also utilising SGX 5-XT cores in their nex-gen DTVs.
Add all of this together and the inevitable conclusion is that IMG will be a dominant graphics force in DTV/SmartTV soon enough. STBs are also a huge target market for IMG.
TKS was delighted about the specific mention of PowerVR graphics by Amazon/Jeff Bezos in the new Kindle Fire HD adverts (see recent post). IMG have a good relationship with Amazon.
I was happy to hear things are going well with LG (currently use Qcom mainly), I'm expecting good things from that partnership.
IMG are anticipating >50% market share in the upcoming Windows 8 (smartphones/tablets) market via their key partners eg. TI, Intel, STE, Samsung.
IMG
Saturday 15 September 2012
Friday 14 September 2012
Post AGM round up
Some things to sum up.
1 Ensigma Tier 1 licensee shipping in volume within 2-3 months
2. Caustic Pro add in card in same time frame. Licensing later but current version only uses CPU and still kicks competition's arse. If coupled with a Rogue SoC then performance multiplies.
3 Ray tracing on chip needs 2 more generations of process reduction to be a goer but licensing soon
4 Rogue kicks arse. Silicon running OpenGL ES 3 was dazzling.
5. Caustic Pro card ditto - and how much better than current offerings at a fraction of the price is staggering.
Forgotten half a dozen other nuggets but will get back ASAP.
Wonderful hooking up with crew new and old all day.
1 Ensigma Tier 1 licensee shipping in volume within 2-3 months
2. Caustic Pro add in card in same time frame. Licensing later but current version only uses CPU and still kicks competition's arse. If coupled with a Rogue SoC then performance multiplies.
3 Ray tracing on chip needs 2 more generations of process reduction to be a goer but licensing soon
4 Rogue kicks arse. Silicon running OpenGL ES 3 was dazzling.
5. Caustic Pro card ditto - and how much better than current offerings at a fraction of the price is staggering.
Forgotten half a dozen other nuggets but will get back ASAP.
Wonderful hooking up with crew new and old all day.
Tony King Smith
Has got his lucky AGM tie on again - that man needs a pay rise !
And the formal bit is over - head for the hills, lock up your daughters, etc
And the formal bit is over - head for the hills, lock up your daughters, etc
Also from Dr D
John Metcalfe (unsung hero) plays a pivotal role in goal setting and targets for divisions and new acquisitions ensuring the culture club thing to allow expansion/scaling being demanded by licensees
Dr D
Is of the opinion that the lowering ASP is more due to Ensigma shipments than Mediatek.
We will find out more on Ensigma licensee during drinks and nibbles hopefully
We will find out more on Ensigma licensee during drinks and nibbles hopefully
For completeness
No divvie mentioned a dividend, nose gays to repel the stench were not required as all attendees appear fragrant at the moment.
All resolutions - miraculously - being passed. Bizarrely 4m voted against re-appointing HY ! Hang your heads in shame you twunts.
All resolutions - miraculously - being passed. Bizarrely 4m voted against re-appointing HY ! Hang your heads in shame you twunts.
Rogue is the D's B's
And will still be the best out there. And indeed SGX MP is better than the competition "wait til you see the benchmarks of some of the recent devices" - presumably this must be a reference to A6.
Doesn't see intel in-house to be a problem as we will 'always be in phones', Intel will always be in PC, the middle ground will sometimes be us, sometimes be in-house.
So not concerned with the relationship or the future now they are finally going to be getting up to e volumes that should be expected.
Doesn't see intel in-house to be a problem as we will 'always be in phones', Intel will always be in PC, the middle ground will sometimes be us, sometimes be in-house.
So not concerned with the relationship or the future now they are finally going to be getting up to e volumes that should be expected.
Sweenoid's Touchy feely Question
Relationship with all top customers still wonderful, plus all US, Chinese and LG, HiSilicon relationships are very strong. Still says he hopes Samsung to be a whole customer again at some point.
Future tech - camera seems to be important, CPU market is also 'in play'
'Hossein, you have to scale up with us'. Say customers who have grown massively.
HY developed the 'Culture Club' - hopefully he doesn't really want to hurt us- where all roadmaps are discussed weekly and allow us to grow - quickly - without losing the corporate or cultural identity.
HY sees Qualcomm as the main competition, NVIDIA a busted flush, Mali is at a different level of penetration (lower) and lower tech than Qualcomm (which I think is odd considering the various published roadmaps).
Future tech - camera seems to be important, CPU market is also 'in play'
'Hossein, you have to scale up with us'. Say customers who have grown massively.
HY developed the 'Culture Club' - hopefully he doesn't really want to hurt us- where all roadmaps are discussed weekly and allow us to grow - quickly - without losing the corporate or cultural identity.
HY sees Qualcomm as the main competition, NVIDIA a busted flush, Mali is at a different level of penetration (lower) and lower tech than Qualcomm (which I think is odd considering the various published roadmaps).
Site
Expect capex on new buildings to be 15m per year for the next couple of years, plus the reason for the purchase was to ensure we couldn't get turfed out by an arse pain landlord.
Very upbeat
From the Boss, very animated and confident about the future prospects. If last year was the most excited we'd seen him, this year was on a par.
I am fairly sure he let slip we will be moving 1bn units by 2015 !!!!! He will definitely backtrack on that later over drinks but it's what he said folks...
Now for the dullsville numbers
I am fairly sure he let slip we will be moving 1bn units by 2015 !!!!! He will definitely backtrack on that later over drinks but it's what he said folks...
Now for the dullsville numbers
TVs
Sees a massive future for 4k TV. he's obviously been privy to some industry bigwigs
Again repeats idea we will become more of a processor company in future.
Again repeats idea we will become more of a processor company in future.
hmm 2
Sees '1 bn shipments of graphics per year in 2yrs or so, then multi billion a few years after that'
2-3 yrs time 100-150m units of comms IP per year
At higher end of chip market royalties are going up, at lowered going down.
He joked that last year analysts moaned we weren't in low end handsets, this year they Moab because ASP is slightly down as we're in low end handsets
2-3 yrs time 100-150m units of comms IP per year
At higher end of chip market royalties are going up, at lowered going down.
He joked that last year analysts moaned we weren't in low end handsets, this year they Moab because ASP is slightly down as we're in low end handsets
'Orange'
Listed under technology partnerships.
EE have LTE rights here, and we know Hellosoft has been licensed to a carrier.
hammerd2 is calling this as the Hellosoft license
EE have LTE rights here, and we know Hellosoft has been licensed to a carrier.
hammerd2 is calling this as the Hellosoft license
Hmm
I know we've never made much cash out of it but I get the feeling HY's not really bothered about the display IP anymore.
Expect licensing of ray tracing IP end of next year.
Expects Meta CPU market to be very important "expect lots of announcements in this area"
More emphasis on Flow - monitoring, management, healthcare devices. Sees Flow as entirely complimentary to everything else.
Next few months for Caustic add in cards - working with major PC companies.
Expect licensing of ray tracing IP end of next year.
Expects Meta CPU market to be very important "expect lots of announcements in this area"
More emphasis on Flow - monitoring, management, healthcare devices. Sees Flow as entirely complimentary to everything else.
Next few months for Caustic add in cards - working with major PC companies.
Auto
Unbelievably the cost of the electronics in a new car is up to 2 x cost of the engine.
Not a lot of people know that. Now blow the bloody doors off.
He's injured
Just seconds after coming off the bench HY announces he's pulled a neck muscle so his customary wink wink shrug shoulders technique for hint making later will be in serious danger
Kick off slightly delayed
to allow the masses to squeeze in to the hall.
Format of the day will be as per usual (dull, boring, interesting, sleepy, mind numbing, drunken, fabulous).
We're about to go with GS going over the running order.
HY's on the bench, looking confident and ready to rock. Ian Pearson as sanguine as ever, the others looking calm. The pressure obviously not got to them yet, but we'll see how the FD goes after some recent collywobbles.
HY's up
Format of the day will be as per usual (dull, boring, interesting, sleepy, mind numbing, drunken, fabulous).
We're about to go with GS going over the running order.
HY's on the bench, looking confident and ready to rock. Ian Pearson as sanguine as ever, the others looking calm. The pressure obviously not got to them yet, but we'll see how the FD goes after some recent collywobbles.
HY's up
AGM Day est arrivée !
The gathering of the Clans has commenced ! Currently in attendance myself, sweenoid, prim, Ronak, brooky, Blueflame, Pete Frost.
Loins are being girded ready for action.
Loins are being girded ready for action.
Thursday 13 September 2012
Interim Management Statement
After the annual excitement of the new iPhone event last night, Imagination announced a solid IMS this morning:
Imagination Technologies Group plc ('Imagination', LSE: IMG), a leading multimedia, communications and embedded processor technology company, is today issuing its Interim Management Statement for the period from 1 May 2012 to 12 September 2012.
Trading update
Following the strong performance in the last financial year, the momentum in the business has continued.
Following the strong performance in the last financial year, the momentum in the business has continued.
Our partners’ product launches in the second half of the last financial year, together with shipments starting for a number of customers for the first time this year, have both contributed to strong growth in unit shipment volumes. The volume growth has been driven across the expected key segments, including: mobile phone, computing/tablets, mobile multimedia/gaming and home consumer. The royalty revenue growth has continued to be strong, in line with expectations. As expected, the strong unit volume growth has steadily extended to the lower-end of the smart phone market resulting in a small downward movement in the average royalty rate.
Licensing activity remains steady but is subject to the usual uncertainty over timing, particularly given the continuing macro-economic volatility.
Pure continues to see steady growth in its international markets and small improvement in its UK business, although the tight economic environment remains a factor. Strategic product developments have been on-going in the year with several key product launches planned for the run-up to Christmas.
We continue to invest in key areas of technology both organically and through targeted acquisition activity. As part of the latter, in June we made a small acquisition of the IP, assets and employees of Nethra Imaging Inc. (Gross Assets £0.4m at end June), which further enhances our capability in the area of camera/video IP.
Technology update
PowerVR GPUs – The PowerVR graphics processor (GPU) family continues to lead the market in technological capability, roadmap strength and ecosystem and remains by far the most adopted and shipped technology of its kind. Many designs across PowerVR Series5 and 5XT and the new generation Series6 family are at different stages of delivery with increasing numbers of Series5XT-based devices entering production and contributing to volume ramp-up. The Series6 IP core family expanded to four members, with others in the pipeline. Several partner prototype devices using Series6 are now at first silicon and are functioning well, with software driver and applications development significantly advanced. The development of Caustic’s complementary ray tracing technology is on track and will, in due course, further strengthen our graphics offering and add to our competitive position.
PowerVR GPUs – The PowerVR graphics processor (GPU) family continues to lead the market in technological capability, roadmap strength and ecosystem and remains by far the most adopted and shipped technology of its kind. Many designs across PowerVR Series5 and 5XT and the new generation Series6 family are at different stages of delivery with increasing numbers of Series5XT-based devices entering production and contributing to volume ramp-up. The Series6 IP core family expanded to four members, with others in the pipeline. Several partner prototype devices using Series6 are now at first silicon and are functioning well, with software driver and applications development significantly advanced. The development of Caustic’s complementary ray tracing technology is on track and will, in due course, further strengthen our graphics offering and add to our competitive position.
PowerVR VPUs – Our PowerVR video decode and encode processor (VPU) families, which support the latest and emerging formats, continue to see strong volume growth. We are seeing a growing industry trend in favour of licensing rather than internal development, particularly as the next generation of advanced video standards are coming to market. In keeping with our strategy of providing leading-edge and market-driving technologies to our customers we recently launched the new PowerVR Series4 video processors offering increased performance and precision as well as supporting the emerging ultra HD resolution displays of 4Kx2K pixels. These technologies are seen as essential for future generations of smart TV products which require very high quality and/or the capability to display full HD at the same time as related information such as social network interactive pages.
Ensigma RPUs – Our Ensigma programmable radio processing unit (RPU) family supporting both multi-standard broadcast receivers and Wi-Fi/BT connectivity is becoming increasingly relevant to mainstream markets and has been designed into a growing number of chips and products. Ensigma RPUs support worldwide TV and radio reception as well as important connectivity standards such as Wi-Fi, all running on the same silicon engine in software. This technology is increasingly essential for delivery of cloud and broadcast content to home and also within the enterprise. Already we have partner devices in volume shipment using this technology for digital radio and Wi-Fi connectivity and we expect several new partner devices targeting multi-standard/global TV markets to begin shipment during the current financial year.
Meta CPUs – the Meta family of embedded processors offers state-of-the-art general-processing combined with multi-threading, demanding real-time and signal-processing capabilities. These capabilities are ideal for highly integrated, feature-rich and cost effective systems. Many of our IP cores integrate Meta processing cores already. Over 50% of the total annual volumes of our IP shipments deploy Meta technology and we expect this trend to continue upwards. The growth of open source operating systems such as Android and other Linux implementations, the trend towards heterogeneous systems/standards, and the inevitable growth of internet connectivity across the majority of devices, will further drive deployment of Meta processors in applications in embedded systems and processors in a variety of markets.
HelloSoft V.VoIP - our HelloSoft family of video and voice over IP (V.VoIP) products, including platform agnostic SDKs, continues to get stronger and more comprehensive, resulting in a number of important engagements for these technologies with both operators and mobile phone OEMs. This is in part driven by the arrival of 4G/Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks which require VoIP over LTE (VoLTE) an area where HelloSoft products are uniquely strong. HelloSoft V.VoIP technology has now been adopted by a number of key network operators for both enterprise and consumer segments with a number of handset design-wins also secured.
Caustic Professional – Technology development and initial customer delivery are making good progress with the first ray-tracing test chip demonstrated and positively received at SIGGRAPH in August 2012.
Pure update
Despite the current slow-down in consumer spending, Pure continues to effectively showcase and help to drive key strategic connectivity technologies. We expect to see a financial improvement in this division over the medium term, driven by international markets and new product opportunities.
Despite the current slow-down in consumer spending, Pure continues to effectively showcase and help to drive key strategic connectivity technologies. We expect to see a financial improvement in this division over the medium term, driven by international markets and new product opportunities.
Outlook
The continuing macro-economic volatility creates caution among our customers. Despite this the licensing pipeline remains robust, although there is the usual uncertainty over the timing of deal closures.
The continuing macro-economic volatility creates caution among our customers. Despite this the licensing pipeline remains robust, although there is the usual uncertainty over the timing of deal closures.
We expect further product launches from our customers, including a number of our significant design wins reaching production, which will continue to drive strong growth in royalty volumes and revenue.
As a result the Board remains confident that the Group is on track for continued progress.
Hossein Yassaie, Imagination’s Chief Executive said:
"Our ‘smart’ technologies are being adopted more widely across both new and existing partners, creating a wider base for continued momentum in future volume growth which maintains our stated goal of around 1bn annual unit shipments by 2016 as a realistic objective."
"Our ‘smart’ technologies are being adopted more widely across both new and existing partners, creating a wider base for continued momentum in future volume growth which maintains our stated goal of around 1bn annual unit shipments by 2016 as a realistic objective."
END
At this stage it is not clear whether the iPhone 5 contains SGX 543MP2 or MP4, but Apple are stating 2x graphics improvement over iPhone 4S. The new iPod Touch was also announced and contains an A5 chip (SGX 543MP2) .
The IMS shows progress across all the important divisions with strong royalty volume & revenue growth a key feature. There is a small reduction in ASP due to the royalty mix - in my view this is mainly due to the strong Mediatek ramp at present.
AGM is tomorrow (many of us will be there) so we hope to be 'liveblogging '.
Friday 7 September 2012
KINDLE FIRE HD UNVEILED, BIG WIN FOR OMAP
Yesterday evening Jeff Bezos (Amazon Inc CEO) unveiled the new line of Kindle Fire HD tablets:
http://reviews.cnet.com/kindle-fire-hd/
The analysts (and tech sites) had talked themselves into believing Tegra 3 had this 'in the bag'. Instead, Bezos revealed the 8.9" versions had OMAP 4470 (with Power VR SGX 544MP) inside. The 7" version is thought to use the OMAP 4460 (Power VR SGX 540). Bezos went out of way to state the advantages of OMAP 4470 over Tegra 3, it's even in the product description on www.amazon.com:
'A rich HD display requires a powerful processor to drive it. The TI OMAP4470 processor in the Kindle Fire HD 8.9" has 40% more memory bandwidth than Tegra 3, enabling faster web browser JavaScript performance. And Kindle Fire HD 8.9" has an Imagination SGX544 3D graphics core that can process over 12 billion floating-point operations per second, so even graphically intensive games run smoothly and render stunning scenery. We also tuned the graphics pipeline and touch handling software to eliminate delays between when you touch the screen and when the application responds. This means the home screen scrolls more smoothly, videos start playing faster, and games respond nearly instantaneously.'
This comes as welcome relief for the OMAP divison (one of IMG's oldest and most trusted partners), which has had tough times of late, with intense competition from Qualcomm, Samsung LSI, Broadcom and Mediatek of course.
It's also a great win for IMG and helps maintain the very high market share for tablets. Next week we have the Apple iPhone 5 announcement (12th), followed 2 days later by the AGM in Kings Langley. The IMS will also be out quite soon,should be pretty upbeat with all this great news.
http://reviews.cnet.com/kindle-fire-hd/
The analysts (and tech sites) had talked themselves into believing Tegra 3 had this 'in the bag'. Instead, Bezos revealed the 8.9" versions had OMAP 4470 (with Power VR SGX 544MP) inside. The 7" version is thought to use the OMAP 4460 (Power VR SGX 540). Bezos went out of way to state the advantages of OMAP 4470 over Tegra 3, it's even in the product description on www.amazon.com:
'A rich HD display requires a powerful processor to drive it. The TI OMAP4470 processor in the Kindle Fire HD 8.9" has 40% more memory bandwidth than Tegra 3, enabling faster web browser JavaScript performance. And Kindle Fire HD 8.9" has an Imagination SGX544 3D graphics core that can process over 12 billion floating-point operations per second, so even graphically intensive games run smoothly and render stunning scenery. We also tuned the graphics pipeline and touch handling software to eliminate delays between when you touch the screen and when the application responds. This means the home screen scrolls more smoothly, videos start playing faster, and games respond nearly instantaneously.'
This comes as welcome relief for the OMAP divison (one of IMG's oldest and most trusted partners), which has had tough times of late, with intense competition from Qualcomm, Samsung LSI, Broadcom and Mediatek of course.
It's also a great win for IMG and helps maintain the very high market share for tablets. Next week we have the Apple iPhone 5 announcement (12th), followed 2 days later by the AGM in Kings Langley. The IMS will also be out quite soon,should be pretty upbeat with all this great news.
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