Imagination @ CES 2015

Imagination today released a detailed CES summary (as they did last year), designed to show they are increasingly active across all 3 major divisions (PowerVR, MIPS, connectivity).
(No mention of the new Mediatek MT5595 unfortunately, so the GPU identity remains unknown for that important TV chip):

London, UK – 12 January, 2015 – Imagination Technologies (IMG.L) reports that an impressively broad range of products at the recent International CES 2015 incorporated one or more of its  technologies, reflecting a growing recognition of Imagination’s leadership capabilities helping to drive industry trends such as higher quality graphics, audio and video; high-performance and highly-efficient processing; and on-chip connectivity. Imagination’s technologies were at the heart of products ranging from the most embedded smart devices for automation and control to the latest high-resolution entertainment products (listed in part below), and featured in notable SoC launches at the show from Actions and RockChip .

Says Tony King-Smith, EVP marketing at Imagination: “It’s been a great start to the year for us. At CES 2015 we saw more ‘smart’ and connected products than ever before using our technologies, including a number of new IoT and wearable products as these segments begin to ramp volume. In home entertainment, CES confirmed there is an overall move toward studio-quality audio and video, migration of 4K TV to mainstream, and growing interest in 8K, along with the re-emergence of OLED as a potential volume TV display technology. These trends all point to the growing demand for Imagination’s scalable technologies and customizable platforms that enable differentiated products as well as feature and performance leadership.”

Products powered by Imagination’s IP (intellectual property) cores at CES included the latest devices in Imagination’s core markets including smartphones, tablets and TVs, and a wide range of smarter connected consumer devices incorporating Imagination’s technologies for communications across both connectivity and broadcast, wireless audio, automotive and intelligent vision. An increasing number of products also combine multiple Imagination IP technologies including including PowerVR multimedia, MIPS CPUs, Ensigma connectivity, Caskeid audio, HelloSoft VoIP, and FlowCloud device-to-cloud technologies.

Entertainment is better with Imagination

On display at CES were some of the latest TVs with PowerVR technology. Imagination demonstrated next-generation 4K user interfaces on an LG smart TV. In addition Imagination featured up to four HD streams being manipulated using advanced graphics effects to deliver an outstanding user experience thanks to combining PowerVR VPU and GPU capabilities on the Intel-based Google Nexus Player. Also on display were a new TV from S2-Tek that uses a demodulator chip for DVB-T2 and DVB-S2 based on the Ensigma Explorer RPU and a soon-to-be-released OTT streaming device that features a Toshiba chip with PowerVR graphics and video as well as Ensigma Wi-Fi 802.11ac 2x2 connectivity. Imagination’s PowerVR GPU technology was also featured in a number of new TV models from LG announced at the show.

During the show, Google announced that it is working to reimagine the living room alongside an ecosystem of TV partners, highlighting Imagination as key participant in its Android TV initiatives.

The latest smartphones, tablets and smartwatches have Imagination

Many of the latest smartphones and tablets announced at the show make use of Imagination’s high-performance, highly efficient PowerVR graphics and video technologies. Products with PowerVR video included the Acer Iconia One 7 B1-750; E-Fun Nextbook 8”; FuHu DreamTab; HP Stream 8; Huawei Honor 6 Plus and Ascend P7 flagship phones; Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 10” (1051F), 8” (830F) and Pro 13” (1380F); Ramos i9s; SurfTab xintron i 7.0 and more.

Products with PowerVR GPUs included the ASUS Fonepad 7 (FE171CG), MeMo Pad 7 (ME572CL), and Zenfone 2; the extremely thin Dell Venue 8 7000 Series tablet – which won the prestigious 2015 CES “Best of Innovation” award; Lenovo P90 phone; KD Kurio Tab (Kurio Xtrem); Illumination Minion Pad and Tectoy Disney Frozen Tablet among others. In addition, the Nokia N1 tablet was made available for pre-orders during the show, selling 20,000 units in just four minutes, as reported by Nokia on its Weibo social media channel, with around half a million others wanting to buy.

Imagination’s customers also unveiled new chipsets with PowerVR Rogue GPUs for tablets and beyond, including the new Falcon Series ATM9009 from Actions Semiconductor, a 64-bit quad-core solution for high-end Android tablets and OTT set-top boxes; and the RK3368 from RockChip, a 64-bit octa-core SoC for tablets and 4K UHD media players.

New smartwatches featuring Imagination’s IP included the Motorola Moto360 smartwatch which features a PowerVR GPU, and new MIPS-based smartwatches including the GEAK Watch 2 and a new smartwatch from iPPea.

The future of high quality audio with Imagination

Imagination’s Caskeid wireless audio IP platform was demonstrated at CES playing back Meridian MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) content. Caskeid is the first wireless multiroom streaming solution to support MQA, a revolutionary new technology that lets listeners hear sound exactly as it was captured in the studio. (See full press release at: http://www.imgtec.com/news/detail.asp?ID=950)

Imagination also demonstrated the latest audio products using technologies including its Ensigma, MIPS and Caskeid technologies. Among the products demonstrated were the PEAQ Munet Smart PMN300 speaker, the Pure Pop Mini radio, and updates to Pure’s Jongo multiroom wireless speakers including the S3X, T2X, and T4X with new family sound, digital equalization and app assisted setup. Philips also showed the new Philips Spotify wireless multiroom speakers which is based on Imagination’s technologies.

The Geek Wave Portable Music Player, a MIPS-based compact music player designed to deliver the highest-resolution audio available, and funded by a highly successful indiegogo campaign, was also shown at CES.

Driving the latest automotive products with Imagination

New automotive products at CES with Imagination IP inside included the Ford SYNC 3, a connected communications and entertainment system that incorporates TI’s Jacinto automotive SoC featuring a PowerVR GPU.

Other demonstrations included the latest Kanzi dashboard UI from Rightware on platforms with PowerVR GPUs including the Renesas R-Car H2 and TI Jacinto 6 platforms. In addition, QNX Software showed an ADAS system, infotainment system, and digital instrument cluster in a QNX reference vehicle based on a Jeep Wrangler, running on the Jacinto 6 processor.

Green Hills Software announced the addition of virtualized, accelerated graphics support for Renesas R-Car H2 processors in its INTEGRITY Multivisor virtualization solution, targeting next-generation graphics-intensive automotive applications such as reconfigurable clusters, navigation systems, ADAS and infotainment. The update to INTEGRITY Multivisor leverages work performed by Green Hills Software, Renesas and Imagination.

A connected, smart home with Imagination

CES attendees could see a demonstration of a variety of smart home applications running on the new MIPS-based Securifi Almond-2015 router, through which Zigbee enabled functions can be controlled via a touchscreen or connected app on Android and iOS devices.

Imagination’s FlowCloud device-to-cloud technology was demonstrated in healthcare and smart home applications, including a home heating control system built on the chipKIT WiFire development board which features a MIPS-based PIC32 MCU from Microchip Technology.

In addition, Imagination showed its HelloSoft HD video, VoIP and echo cancellation software integrated with its mobile FlowTalk client software running on devices including Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. The EVQM (Enhanced Voice Quality Management) and DVQM (Dynamic Video Quality Management) algorithms ensured superior voice and video quality even in the crowded wireless environment at the show. Imagination’s WebRTC and VoIP software was also demonstrated embedded in a home gateway and a new MIPS-based IP camera.

Imagination powers the connected experience

Ikanos Communications announced that ST&T, which has a track record of providing home automation products to top global OEMs and carriers including Honeywell, AT&T and NTT, selected its MIPS-based Ikanos Fusiv Vx500 chipset for next-generation high-performance gateway platforms targeting a range of home automation, monitoring and other smart-home applications.

Quantenna Communications and Lantiq announced availability of a joint system solution, leveraging Lantiq’s MIPS-based GRX300 communications processor family, designed to address the Ethernet retail router market. Liquid Image announced that it selected Altair Semiconductor’s 4G chipsets – which are based on MIPS – for the Ego LS Camera developed to live stream videos and images through the Verizon 4G LTE network to social networks and cloud servers.

Also on display at CES was the Chiwawa, a compact Wi-Fi module with a MIPS-based Qualcomm Atheros AR9331 SoC which supports a Linux distribution based on OpenWrt called Linino.

New Imagination technologies will power future consumer products

Imagination showed the power of its new PowerVR imaging framework for Android, highlighting GPU compute features including image processing, live camera stream processing, face detect and fluid dynamics, on phones from Lenovo and tablets from Dell and ASUS. During CES, Luxoft announced that it has implemented its advanced image and video enhancement technology, Pixerra, to leverage Imagination’s PowerVR imaging framework for Android, achieving optimal SoC performance and power-efficiency.

Imagination demonstrated the latest PowerVR Rogue graphics features, including 4K textures, high-triangle throughput, physically based lighting, HDR (high dynamic range) rendering and hardware tessellation on a variety of products including the latest tablets, smartphones, smartwatches, smart TVs and OTT set-top boxes. In addition, Imagination showed hybrid rendering with ray tracing running on a PowerVR ‘Wizard’ development platform. Using the new Huawei Honor 6 phone, Imagination showed how H.264 video can be played back, captured by a PowerVR video encoder and sent over the network to a receiver via Miracast with exceptionally low latency.

Highlighting the benefits of combining PowerVR GPUs and video processors, Imagination showed region of interest encoding with an algorithm using GPU compute for face detection in bandwidth-limited scenarios. Imagination also showed how GPU compute can enable powerful retail analytics functionality in a demonstration using a Vadaro camera with a PowerVR GPU.

The connected products of tomorrow are only as secure as their weakest links, making Imagination’s hardware virtualization based multi-domain security a must for next-generation connected products. Multiple hypervisors including the FEXEROX hypervisor from SELTECH Corp. were demonstrated on a MIPS M5150 platform, showing how virtualization-based security enables multiple operating systems to run separately and securely on one CPU.

Imagination powers innovation with Creator

The recent announcement of the Creator CI20, the first of a series of advanced low-cost boards targeting developers and featuring not only MIPS and PowerVR technologies, but also Imagination’s innovative FlowCloud IoT infrastructure, continue to stimulate tremendous interest with schools and universities as well as developers and entrepreneurs worldwide. New projects demonstrated or developed on the MIPS Creator CI20 development board at CES included a wide range of Linux desktop and Android applications running at full HD resolution, such as OpenArena and the popular VLC media player.

See Imagination for yourself

The next opportunities to see Imagination will be at Embedded World, Mobile World Congress and the Game Developers Conference (GDC), where further announcements will be made around SoCs and end products using Imagination’s IP. 

Imagination 14/15 interims

IMG posted interims yesterday, which were well received by the market (judging by the 16% SP rise on the day)
The headliners on the day were future prediction of 30-40% EBIT margin ie. where it should be for an IP company (currently around 12-15%), strong emphasis on reduced cost-base growth (aiming for 5-10%) , better than expected MIPS numbers. Non-MIPS ASP was 28c (vs.26c last year), due to the mix , and MIPS 5.1c .
Other interesting bits were the mention of Loongson, and the fact that 2 companies now each contribute >10% of total revenue: Apple around 30% as usual and another US company (?BCOM) 16%.
In some ways it feels like ground zero again, but this time IMG has done the heavy spending in the '3 legs' and is 'good to go' for the next 5 years. Here's hoping...

CC (good performance from HY and even RS, no laryngitis this time!)
http://www.imgtec.com/Investors/audio/index.asp

Presentation:
http://imgtec.com/investors/presentations/161214/IMG-Half-yearly-Presentation-2014.pdf

Results:

http://imgtec.com/investors/presentations/161214/IMG-Half-yearly-Report-2014.pdf

Summary:

Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE: IMG, “Imagination”, “the Group”), a leading multimedia, processor and communications technology company, today announces results for the six months to 31 October 2014.

Overview
• Financial performance for H1 in line with expectations, with strong progress in licensing and design-wins
• Current financial year represents a transitional year from heavy investment in strategic product lines to a position where the core products are all either generating or moving towards generating revenues
• Complete product line now enables increased leverage of full capabilities in many existing or developing and emerging markets
• Group anticipates a much stronger H2 financial performance

Financial highlights
• Technology revenues increased 3% to £72.8m (2013: £70.8m)
- Licensing revenues up 11% to £16.0m (2013: £14.4m)
- Royalty revenues robust at £56.3m (2013: £56.2m)
• Group half-year revenues of £82.2m (2013: £85.2m)
• Adjusted operating profit* of £5.0m (2013: £12.4m); Reported operating loss of £9.0m (2013: profit £1.4m)
• Adjusted earnings per share* 1.3p (2013: 3.8p); Reported loss per share 3.9p (2013: loss 0.4p)

Business highlights
• Growing customer engagement with significant agreements signed with over 20 partners during the period
 Strong licensing progress – 49 licenses signed (2013: 43)
 Agreements signed with partners including Ali, Avago, Broadcom, Celeno, Fujitsu, Intel, Lantiq, Loongson, MediaTek, Siklu, Texas Instruments, Toshiba and Toumaz
• Significant increase in new committed SoCs with over 35 SoC design-wins added which will contribute to future royalties
• Royalty revenues on track, with both MIPS shipments and average royalty rate above expectations
• Operating costs continue to be tightly managed now that the heavy investment is over and actions taken have led to refocus of Pure business. Rate of operating cost growth reduced dramatically from previous years

Outlook
• Based on active pipeline of prospects, continue to target 10% growth in licensing revenue in FY2015
• On track to meet market expectations for royalty revenue, with strong performance in average royalty rate and MIPS volumes offsetting flat non-MIPS royalty units
• In line with previous guidance, FY2015 underlying operating costs around 10% higher than FY2014
• Expansion of operating margins in medium-term with longer-term target of 30%-40%

Hossein Yassaie, Chief Executive, commented:

“I am pleased with our progress in the first half. During this transitional year for the Group we have seen continued progress in licensing, robust royalty revenues and disciplined cost control. As a result we remain confident of achieving our targets for the year.

“Now that our product lines are complete and the heavy investment phase is over, we expect to see lower rates of operating cost growth going forward and increased focus on financial returns. Our market relevant and complementary technologies combined with our increased scale enable us to take advantage of the natural leverage to improve the financial performance of our business. As a result we now expect to see significant expansion in operating margins in the medium-term.”

END

IMG announces Power VR Series 7

HY mentioned at the AGM that Series 7 would be announced soon, here we are:

London, UK – 10^th November, 2014 – Imagination Technologies (IMG.L) introduces PowerVR Series7, the latest generation of the PowerVR Rogue GPU architecture and an entire line-up of GPUs which scale from 16 to 512 arithmetic logic unit (ALU) cores, providing unprecedented scalability, efficiency and performance.

PowerVR Series7 is architected for the broadest range of next-generation products from wearables and IoT through automotive, mobile and consumer electronics devices, up to high-performance GPU compute. Highly configurable, scalable GPUs address market requirements across these segments, with new features such as full hardware virtualization and Android Extension Pack (AEP) support with hardware tessellation, as well as proven features such as geometry shaders, PVR3C™ triple compression technology for bandwidth/power savings, and full ASTC (adaptive scalable texture compression) support. Series7 also includes Imagination’s advanced PowerGearing™ technology for dynamic core and cluster level power management.

Tony King-Smith, EVP marketing, Imagination, says: “With graphics-enabled devices entering all aspects of everyday life, it is no longer possible to offer just point solutions. Each new generation requires a wavefront of GPUs from low to high end, to address the broad spectrum of applications. With PowerVR Series7, we have not only honed our architecture but also our IP support with tools such as our Design Optimization Kits for rapid physical and performance optimization. These allow our partners to choose right-sized solutions based on the optimum balance of power, performance and area for every segment.”

Says Jon Peddie, president, Jon Peddie Research: “With PowerVR Series7, Imagination is offering advanced new features such as hardware tessellation that will enable the company to make aggressive inroads into a broad range of new markets. With virtualization in the new cores, Imagination is looking beyond providing powerful graphics and compute performance toward providing even more value in helping to secure their customers’ SoCs.”

Superior multi-cluster scalability

The PowerVR Rogue architecture is scalable via threads, cores and clusters. Rogue uses clusters of up to 32 multi-threaded ALU cores, working in close cooperation with dedicated texture units on the same region of the screen. This approach ensures that all accesses to memory are correlated and efficient, unlike older multi-core approaches where many cores all work in an uncoordinated way on different regions of the screen which results in many distributed accesses to memory and inefficient DRAM usage. With their highly scalable and efficient architecture, PowerVR Series7 GPUs provide unrivalled performance and efficiency.

Significant architectural performance improvements

Series7XT and Series7XE GPUs achieve up to a 60% architectural performance increase on the latest industry standard benchmarks compared to equivalent configurations of previous generation PowerVR Series6XT/6XE GPUs, maintaining and extending PowerVR’s reputation as the most efficient, highest performance, lowest power GPU. Application developers can take advantage of the significant parallel processing power in Series7 for both graphics and GPU compute tasks. Series7 architectural enhancements include:

·         Instruction set enhancements including added co-issue capability, resulting in improved application performance and increased GPU efficiency

·         New hierarchical layout structure that enables scalable polygon throughput and pixel fillrate improvements in addition to increased clock frequencies

·         GPU compute setup and cache throughput improvements resulting in up to 300% better parallel processing performance

Series7XT: dramatically scalable performance from 100 GFLOPS to 1.5 TFLOPS 

The PowerVR Series7XT family of GPUs is designed to provide the best possible performance and user experience for next-generation user interfaces, 3D gaming and GPU compute. Series7XT targets mid-range to high-end applications including smartphones and tablets, UltraHD TVs and set-top boxes, gaming consoles and high-performance server compute. Featuring AEP and 10-bit YUV support as standard, Series7XT GPUs are based on two to sixteen clusters, each containing 32 multi-threaded multi-tasking ALU cores, with high-end configurations capable of achieving teraflop level performance. GPUs include the two cluster GT7200, four cluster GT7400, six cluster GT7600, eight cluster GT7800, and 16 cluster GT7900, with other configurations available.

Series7XE: optimized for area, efficiency and feature configurability

Series7XE GPUs are based on a single scalable cluster of up to 32 multi-threaded multi-tasking ALU cores, enabling the latest games and apps on power and cost constrained devices such as entry-level to mid-range mobile devices, TVs, set-top boxes and wearables, as well as a broadening range of products such as photocopiers, printers, consumer and other enterprise devices which increasingly require high-quality UIs at competitive price points. Series7XE are the smallest GPUs that are AEP compatible, yet like the high-performance Series7XT family can be configured with options such as 10-bit YUV support for HEVC, making them ideal for applications like entry level UltraHD TVs. GPUs include the GE7400 with 16 cores and the GE7800 with 32 cores.

Hardware virtualization and multi-domain security

In an increasingly connected world, security is a growing concern, with any system only as secure as its weakest link. This is true at the macro level, device level and SoC level. Within the SoC, especially as the industry moves to heterogeneous processing architectures, each processing unit must have built-in security. Imagination’s forthcoming heterogeneous security architecture is designed to address the privacy and security needs of evolving and emerging connected applications. As part of this, PowerVR Series7 joins the MIPS Warrior CPUs in supporting full hardware virtualization, and is optimized to support multiple independent security contexts and execution domains.

CPU-agnostic hardware virtualization in the GPU enables customers in segments such as automotive to build systems where the dashboard and infotainment system can run independently and reliably on the same platform. For Android phones and tablets, hardware virtualization can keep a user’s personal banking data separate from other data such as health information collected by a wearable device.

Feature scalability for optimized designs

With Series7, users can select the specific features they need for their design, and avoid the cost of including features they don’t need:

·         Android Extension Pack (AEP): customers targeting Android applications can leverage the AEP with full hardware tessellation and native OpenGL® ES 3.1 support* in the new GPUs. The new pack ensures maximum content compatibility with the Android 5.0 ‘Lollipop’ release.

·         DirectX 11 Feature Pack: for customers targeting Microsoft operating systems, this pack for Series7XT GPUs provides a full DirectX 11.2 feature set, building on Imagination’s many years of market-proven support for DirectX.

·         OpenCL™ FP64 Feature Pack: for customers leveraging Series7XT for high-performance server compute, this pack provides a scalable 64-bit floating point co-processor per cluster.

Software and tools support

Imagination provides developers with free access to the cross-platform PowerVR SDK, designed to support all aspects of 3D graphics application development; as well as tools and utilities that ease development of 3D graphics and GPU compute applications. Developers can join the PowerVR Insider community, download the SDK for free and interact with the community of 50,000+ members through developer forums athttp://community.imgtec.com/developers/powervr/.

Hypervisors for any SoC using PowerVR Series7 GPUs will be able to utilize the virtualization in the GPUs to implement true heterogeneous security.

Availability

PowerVR Series7XE and Series7XT GPUs are available for licensing now. Imagination is already engaged with multiple PowerVR Series7 licensing partners including two tier-ones. Physical Design Optimization Kits (DOKs) for Imagination’s PowerVR Series7XT and Series7XE GPUs will also be available, offering customers the flexibility to optimize for power, performance and area (PPA). Imagination DOKs are comprised of optimized reference design flows, tuned libraries from partners, characterization data and documentation. Contactinfo@imgtec.com for more information.

About PowerVR GPUs

Imagination’s PowerVR graphics processors (GPUs) are the de facto standard for mobile and embedded graphics and GPU compute. The PowerVR GPU family leads the market in technological capability, roadmap breadth and ecosystem, and is by far the most adopted and shipped technology of its kind. PowerVR graphics IP comprises a comprehensive portfolio of the industry’s leading GPUs, supporting a broad range of applications. See: http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/graphics.asp.

Apple Q4

Apple posted yet more record figures last night. iPhone figures beat expectations at 39.3m sold (with 2w contribution from the new iPhone 6/plus) whilst iPad met expectations at 12.3m sold. iPod Touch numbers will be rolled into a new category (from Q1, the December quarter) called 'other products' and this will include Apple TV and Apple Watch.
So another 50m+ volume contribution to IMG's H1. Apple Q1 15 is obviously going to be huge.

Transcript:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/2576865-apples-aapl-ceo-tim-cook-on-q4-2014-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single

Royalty numbers for IMG look to be fairly static for IMG this FY, despite Apple's best efforts. Mediatek is starting to ship the MT6595 (and MT8135 for tablets) in decent volumes but pretty much all their other high volume smartphone chips are Mali, and this trend continues into 2015 with the recently announced MT6735 (LTE). We await evidence of IMG recovering market share at MTK, and given the timescales indicated by HY, I would be expecting announcements at MWC in February. So we are looking at FY 15/16 before royalty volume growth begins again. I would also be hoping to see solid evidence of Ensigma volume growth in 15/16. As far as MIPS goes, we need some big wins before anyone actually believes the talk (not just ecosystem initiatives).

Post AGM Thoughts

Back at Padders en route home with the inevitable delays on FGW. Some things never change.

Despite my desire to give everyone a right royal kicking today for failing to provide what we want when we want it in terms of PR, unit delivery, license creation, etc once you get in front of the Pied Piper of Kings Langley it's hard not to fall under his spell. Some things never change.

Even when you still feel from his answers that he is a little oversensitive to suggestions that things seemed to have been presented in a less than straight bat way you can still be swayed. Some things never change.

When you hear that there are great things coming over the hill in a couple of years you can't help but think you've heard something similar a few times before. Some things never change.

You enjoy the demo room, some parts of which are now like dear, dusty old friends, you meet the usual suspects, who by now you see more often than many of our oldest friends, you enjoy the hospitality. Some things never change.

But some things change. Some things make you feel there is a difference in the air. Sometimes you sense that this time, yes THIS time, the shiny thing you see over there just beyond your clear sight is actually the light at the end of the tunnel and not the jackdaw's bauble that's been intermittently catching your eye.

Is this one of those things ? Who knows, these things are so fraught with obstacles that it's hard to see the finishing line for them.

Not this year, that's for sure, be in no doubt that H1 is going to be an absolute disaster in terms of financial performance. But H2 will see a substantial improvement (over an admittedly woeful H1) and next year will see some level of improvement from already signed older licenses in many fields (yes! we will finally see some Ensigma units).

But if you're hoping that next year will be Shangri La then you may also be disappointed.

The huge number of licenses signed last year are almost worthless per deal (£38m for 100+ licenses) there is huge hope for results from more of these than normal.

Teams are in the East repairing relationships, things are positive in terms of tech news from the west, we have repelled some patent trolling mo-fo's apparently and we have enough cash to pay for the last building and any further work we need to do in terms of cash flow

We are, I believe, truly 2 years from majorly improved results. Some things never change.

Initial thoughts

While they still vote on stuff. Seems GS is staying on the board ??? I thought he was off and wished him happy retirement earlier, do I feel silly now.

I've been boiling in the run up to this AGM to the point where I was mouthing off  on the train while we were sat opposite one of the board members !

I don't think I've entirely had many/any of my serious concerns satisfied properly really as I really don't think SHY gets what we are all concerned about. I am sure he feels we are just continually wanting to see the SP going up and are only ever cheesed off when it doesn't, and that is a basic misunderstanding of what so many of us feel about this company we have invested so much time and money in. I still think he exhibits a very odd sense of naïveté with his belief that the best will always win out (check out MALI boss) and that customers will always be rational (check out Samsung, Intel, Mediatek, etc boss) but his enthusiasm remains undimmed and infectious.

You've got to love him. I just wish he'd be a bit more of a bastard when it comes to the business end of thing or at least hire a few more people around him who are not "so nice".

We need more bad to the bone folks.

hammerd2 questions

As SHY is always totally swamped afterwards I tried to make my in meeting questions specific to him in the expectation that the other concerns can be referred to less busy people during the informal part of the process.

And so to lunch. When they've finished voting on stuff.

Resolutions

I am sure will all be passed.

PF

SHY also mentioned that if we needed to show good numbers or get cash we could just go get a mortgage for the property we own pretty much outright or the data centre. 

Other guy also asked where margins would go and was told that we were probably at the low point. 

Pete Frost question

We've got less cash now than we've had for years, should we be worried about a need to have a rights issue situation ?

No. We've got £23m buffer facility which we haven't touched, nor do we see the need to touch it. We see few millions positive cash in next year or so, then 10m's and increasing thereafter.

Richard Woolaston question

We've had times of profits and now we're in a loss situation while investing heavily, when are we going to be actually monetising the investments or are we going to be eternally re-investing.

Answer is basically we got unlucky in timing where we got shafted by conditions when we were heavily investing in the future businesses. Expectations 2-4 years for return to increasing profit levels better than the old days.

HY said he wouldn't be invested in IMG if we were only graphics "because ARM would have pressured us in the low end - which they did..."

"I only invest in business directions where I see profits at the end of it. I hate blue sky thinking without money at the end"

Hammerd2 question

It went on a bit, expressed disappointment with the level of communication of the downside stuff over the past 18 months and the lack of successful forecasting. SHY said its easy to underestimate from the outside how serious the waves were through the exits of the big semis.

Doesn't accept they could have done any different.

Asked where the old SoC table went - claims they can't do it any longer as they simply don't know. I don't 100% buy this as they must have some idea but he says they can't just knock out a table when they can't give real numbers, so he has a point I guess.

Asked how it is that there is now 100+ licensees only generating £38m. Answer is that whereas previously there were only a small number of licensees paying more there are now far more licensees paying less but making it easier for many more people to be able to make SoCs - thus hopefully evening out the peaks and troughs a little if some end up sinking without trace or leaving the market entirely.

I asked if they felt the business model (developing major IP categories with a view to high value licensing to an initial limited number of customers) was now out of date as most of them have now disappeared. Was basically referred to the previous answer as eg RT is expected to be able to go to many more smaller companies.

Again reiterated that he saw the first implementations in a "console or console type product" for which I can only read an Apple TV type of product as the mainstream consoles are now largely PC type product based with add in cards, yet RT seems only now to be designed for a mobile chip type of deployment.