Imagination Technologies is a company you’ve probably never heard of, but they’re absolutely essential in the mobile industry. They design graphics processors that they then license out to companies who in turn embed it into their processors. Their famous PowerVR SGX GPU has been inside every iOS product to hit the market, which makes sense since Apple owns 9.5% of the company. Their latest creation, the PowerVR Series 6 architecture currently codenamed “Rouge”, is currently being licensed by 6 companies: ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, MediaTek, and three who wish to remain confidential. We’re betting that one of those three companies is Apple, who will put it in an as yet to be announced processor, likely to be called the A6.
Now just how powerful is the Series 6? ST-Ericsson, who announced their Nova A9600 platform which combines the Series 6 GPU with a pair of ARM Cortex A15 processors that can scale to 2.5 GHz back in February of this year, says that their chip will be able to pump out 350 million polygons per second. To put that into perspective, the iPad 2, which features a Series 5 GPU, maxes out at 30 million polygons per second. That’s over a 10x increase, something we saw when Apple went from the first iPad to the second iPad, so it’s very likely that the third iPad will get a Series 6 GPU, along with a higher resolution screen to put that GPU to the test.
Curiously, MediaTek is also included as one of the companies who will use the Series 6. They’re a Taiwanese firm that’s known for producing ultra low cost chips that power a majority of the bootleg devices flowing out of the shady parts of China into markets in India and Africa. Could MediaTek be planning to expand to high performance smartphones? How will that impact the current mobile landscape over the next say … 5 years?
This is going to be interesting to watch.