IMG in Tokyo

At Embedded Technology 2011 (Japan), IMG released a sort of Technology Update:

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=658


The 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....

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. 

Samsung comes back to Imagination Tech

This morning the following exciting news was released:

Licenses high-performance multiprocessor graphics core to Samsung Electronics

Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE: IMG; "Imagination"), a leader in System-on-Chip Intellectual Property ("SoC IP"), has signed a license agreement with Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. ("Samsung") for IP from Imagination's PowerVR SGX MP multiprocessor graphics family.

Samsung will deploy Imagination's technologies in multiple SoCs targeting mobile and consumer markets.

Under the terms of its licensing arrangements, Imagination receives licence fees and royalty revenues on SoCs incorporating Imagination's IP.

END

It is not clear at this stage which SGX MP core/s are licensed but either way this is a hugely significant move. Many analysts had interpreted/misrepresented Samsung LSI's graphics agreement with ARM as a wholesale move away from IMG.

HY had continued to point out IMG have an ongoing relationship with Samsung,(indeed Hummingbird SoCs still ship in large volumes), and there would be future opportunities. It is also the nature of Samsung  to use several vendors.

This agreement today proves IMG remain an important partner for Samsung and is another setback for ARM Mali.

TI Q3 and Renesas news

As we already know, TI's OMAP business is going great guns, from the Q3 CC last night:

'Our OMAP revenue should continue to benefit in the quarters ahead as our latest customer programs continue to ramp into production.
Recently announced programs that are based on our OMAP 4 platform include: Samsung's Nexus smartphone, which will be our first OMAP production program based on Google's Ice Cream Sandwich reference platform; also, Samsung's Galaxy SII smartphone; Motorola's Droid Bionic and Droid RAZR smartphones; LG's Thrill smartphone, which is the first to feature 3D playback and capture; and the recently announced Amazon Fire tablet. A great lineup of customer products with more to come.'

And in Q/A, a clear reference to the apparent early Android tablet market penetration of  Nvidia's Tegra 2 (sell-through volume  very low of course):
' We have to win our business, and re-win our business everyday. But I would say the same time, for a lot of these customers, TI has been a long-term supplier of many products into their handsets. My own view, as I think Honeycomb was a bit of an anomaly especially on the tablet side because there was a race by many OEMs to have some type of demonstration product available at last year's Consumer Electronics show, and that drove at least what I would say was very visible as when from maybe another supplier. And as I would have described even back in last January, a lot of those same OEMs that were demonstrating platform space on another supplier at Consumer Electronics Show, we had active development programs underway at that same point in time with OMAP. So I think the difference is we are a supplier that they've had a history with. They're comfortable. They know we can support both their business terms, as well as the kind of volume production requirements that operationally these high-volume handsets require.'


In addition, we have this announcement from Renesas at 4G World:

October 2011 - Renesas Mobile Corporation, an innovative supplier of advanced cellular semiconductor solutions and platforms, will demonstrate its high performance 3D mobile platform, the MP5225, for Android-based smartphones at 4G World 2011 in Chicago (24-27 October, Renesas Mobile Stand 2025). Incorporating dual ARM™ Cortex™ A9's running at 1.2 GHz and an advanced multi-core PowerVR™ Series5XT MP Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) from Imagination Technologies, the platform represents a significant step towards delivering a games console quality experience on a mobile phone.
The MP5225 platform has been designed to deliver outstanding performance with Android™. At its heart is the R-Mobile APE5R state-of-the-art low-power, high-performance application processor, which includes the industry's leading multi-core mobile graphics engine, PowerVR SGX543 MP2 from Imagination Technologies, to deliver stunning class-leading 2D/3D graphics.

IMG's own TKS had this to say:

"Graphics performance is fundamental to the Android user experiences in both UI and apps-something Imagination understands very well thanks to our close working relationship with Google on every release of Android from v2.1 "Éclair" to the latest v4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich", said Tony King-Smith, VP Marketing, Imagination. "Renesas Mobile is delivering tremendous mobile GPU performance to smartphone and tablet designers and apps developers thanks to our PowerVR multicore GPU solutions. As Android grows in importance as a major consumer software platform, we believe Renesas Mobile is very well placed to power truly class-leading devices for Android."

Imagination Chinese growth 2012

There was yet another interesting article in Digitimes today:

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20111019PD214.html

'Major Taiwan-based IC design houses including MediaTek, MStar Semiconductor, Novatek Microelectronics, ILI Technology (Ilitek), Orise Technology and Sitronix Technology will look to smartphones for growth in 2012, industry sources have claimed. In particular, the players are expected to profit from China's booming smartphone market, th sources said.

China's local brands including Huawei Device, Lenovo and ZTE, and international brands such as Samsung Electronics are all gearing up for a surge in smartphone sales in the country, the sources indicated. The players will likely see their shipments to the China market more than double in 2012, meaning that a large increase in orders could be released to their component suppliers.

Huawei's overall handset shipments for 2011 are estimated at 19 million units, and the number will expand further to 40 million in 2012, the sources revealed. Smartphones are seen as a major growth driver, the sources said.

Huawei reportedly plans to adopt smartphone solutions from MediaTek starting 2012. The vendor currently purchases most of its handset solutions from Qualcomm.

Lenovo has set a goal of shipping 25-30 million handsets in 2012, more than doubling from the 12 million units estimated to ship in 2011, the sources noted. Its popular A60-series smartphones use 3G solutions from MediaTek.

Meanwhile, Samsung and ZTE are both expected to see their smartphone sales in China grow substantially in 2012, the sources indicated. Samsung reportedly sources panel-use driver ICs from Taiwan companies, whereas ZTE plans to launch low-priced smartphones with chipset solutions also coming from MediaTek.'

END

The 2012 estimates for Lenovo and Huawei come to 65-70 million units, whilst ZTE is larger than both of them (no.1 in China). Clearly not all these are going to contain Mediatek chips but it is clear they will account for a substantial proportion in 2012 for the above 3 players.

Add in to that Samsung, which uses Hummingbirds SoCs for many of its Chinese smartphones/tablets, Renesas with Emma Mobile EV2 shipping in volume there (and newer android SoCs coming) and also TI OMAP 3 is shipping in decent volumes in China. Then there is Apple with its well documented aggressive Chinese expansion,(and smaller players like GeneralPlus). Intel also has good infrastructure in China and will release Medfield-based products no doubt.

Looks like 2012 is gonna be huge for IMG in China. Volume is anyone's guess !

Imagination & Android

There's been a lot of IMG-related big news in the past 24 hours...

1st off , Apple Q4 revealed they shifted 11m iPads, 17m iPhones, and approx. 4m iPod Touches, giving about 32m royalty volume for IMG (plus some iPod Nano at lower ASP). This was a 'product transition' quarter for Apple, as they had already stated last time round, but some analysts did not pay attention. More importantly Apple signalled a record-busting Xmas quarter to come, which is obviously excellent news for IMG.
I am expecting in the region of 45-50m royalty volume for Xmas (25m iPhones, 15m iPads and 10m iPod Touches) quarter.
Next, during Intel Q3 CC Otellini confirmed that Medfield would ship in smartphones/tablets 1st half of 2012. It is not clear exactly which SGX core is contained in Medfield at this point but it's definitely IMG (graphics + video).

Then we had the Motorola Mobility event during which S.Jha unveiled another Android flagship phone- Motorola Droid Razr (for Verizon), which uses OMAP 4430.
Finally there was the OMAP 4460 powered Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the 1st Google Experience ICS (Android 4.0) smartphone.
We can expect lots more OMAP 4 powered ICS products in the next 12 months.

IMG are really going great guns right now on all fronts.

Mediatek ramping up

Taiwanese chip powerhouse and committed IMG partner Mediatek are starting to ramp up volume of the 3.75G chip MT6573, according to Digitimes:

"China's brand-name handset vendors, including Lenovo, ZTE and TCL, have ordered more MT6573 3.75G smartphone chips from MediaTek, according to industry sources. To meet the continued rising demand, the fabless IC firm has asked for additional foundry capacity equivalent to 6,000-8,000 12-inch wafers from United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), the sources indicated."

MediaTek is expected to see monthly shipments of its MT6573 chipset solutions to reach 1-1.5 million units in October and November, and continue expanding to 3.5-4 million in December, the sources estimated. The growing shipments will boost the company's sales in the fourth quarter of 2011, the sources said.

In addition, acknowledging the MT6573's popularity, Huawei Technologies reportedly is asking MediaTek to accelerate development of the chip's successor, the sources said. Dubbed the MT6575, the next-generation single-chip solution could start shipping as early as the first quarter of 2012, the sources indicated."END
 
In addition to this Daiwa Securities are reporting that Motorola Mobility is selecting the MT6573 for its Chinese W-CDMA handsets, where it already does good volume.
Huawei's usual partner is global no.1 mobile chip vendor Qualcomm, so a switch would be very significant.The MT6575 in 2012 could conceivably use the SGX 5-XT (license announced in May) given that it is a 'next generation' chip ?


There is also MT6513 , the 2.75G version of MT6573, already shipping in volume.An IMG'd tablet chip is also very likely for 2012.
Putting all this together in my opinion is likely to result in IMG's royalty volume from Mediatek exceeding 50m for 2012.Pretty soon they may well be rivalling TI/OMAP for IMG chip volume, 2nd only to the mighty Apple.
Wonder how long it will take 'analysts' to figure this out?


A while ago , ARM's Mali PR team appeared to have developed a strategy of trying to steal IMG's (hard-earned)thunder by announcing a CPU+Mali deal with semis that had recently announced a PVR tie-up, Mediatek being a case in point. The anti-IMG brigade made much of this, but we suspected it was little more than a PR stunt - now we can see the reality of the situation.....

iPhone 4S benchmarks appearing

Preliminary iPhone 4S benchmarks are starting to come in from sources like Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4951/iphone-4s-preliminary-benchmarks-800mhz-a5-slightly-slower-gpu-than-ipad-2

As expected, Samsung's high-flying Galaxy SII gets 'owned' by the iPhone 4S thanks to the Apple A5 SoC featuring SGX 543MP2. More proof that Samsung's decision to go with ARM Mali graphics instead of sticking with PowerVR was a big mistake.

PowerVR sewing up the DTV SoC market

 

Well, IMG today announced that Mediatek has licensed another SGX 5XT core, this time for the DTV market. Between MStar and Mediatek ,IMG now has the top 2 global providers of DTV SoC on-board. Further confirmation, for those who still need it, of HY's confidence with respect to the Home market at the AGM.
This comes the day after the sad death of Steve Jobs, there are not enough superlatives to describe this person . In my view, without the support and backing of this amazing individual, IMG would be just a small fraction of the global graphics/video IP leader they have become - that is just my opinion.

Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE: IMG; "Imagination") – a leader in System-on-Chip Intellectual Property ("SoC IP") - reports that it has signed a license agreement with MediaTek Inc., a leading fabless semiconductor company for wireless communications and digital multimedia solutions, for a member of Imagination's POWERVR SGX Series5XT graphics processor family. MediaTek will deploy the technology in its future SoC devices targeting the digital TV market.

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

iPhone 4S

As expected, Apple took back the title of Best Smartphone in the world with the iPhone 4S.
Samsung's Galaxy SII has done excellent business of late (though still unable to keep up with iPhone 4 sales) and has also topped the Benchmarks.
With iPhone 4S, featuring the A5 Apple chip (dual core A9 + SGX 543 MP2), Apple will easily regain the top Benchmarks in the coming weeks. Anandtech has previously benchmarked the iPad 2 (A5 chip)and the results were in a different league.
IMGers can look forward to continued massive sales of iOS devices.

PowerVR inside the Kindle Fire

Great news , confirmed by the Kindle VP as quoted in the WSJ "The Kindle Fire uses a Texas Instruments Inc. dual-core, 1 gigahertz processor".
So that's OMAP 4 then with SGX 540 inside (most likely OMAP 4430 but not confirmed).
Given the $199 price point and Amazon's huge marketing muscle this should be a huge seller.
With the impending debut of Google ICS in October , iPhone announcements on 4th October,and RIM QNX product announcements mid-October things are shaping up very well for IMG over the next month.

MStar licenses PowerVR Graphics IP

Another superb win for IMG with a new partner, MStar Semiconductor, the global no.1 independent DTV chip supplier. This highly aggressive Taiwanese company has taken market share from Mediatek and others in the Chinese/Asian markets over the past few years.
At the AGM , HY said he 'cannot over-emphasise design-win strength in this area' when referring to the Home/Consumer market.

Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE: IMG; "Imagination"), a leader in System-on-Chip Intellectual Property ("SoC IP"), has signed a multi-use license agreement with MStar Semiconductor, Inc. (MStar), a worldwide leader in Digital TV chip sales, for IP from Imagination's PowerVR SGX Series5XT graphics family.

MStar will deploy Imagination's technologies in SoCs targeting consumer markets.



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