Power VR is back !!

[Gamer X]

The Inquirer

WE CHECKED Imagination Technologies' latest roadmap and to our surprise we learned that, after years of absence, the company is ready to reintroduce desktop and portable Power VR cores.

Its previous offerings, the Kyro and Kyro 2 cores were pretty successful, but since then we haven?t seen anything from the Power VR stable on the desktop.

The firm made an effort to make a Kyro 3 but never completed the chip. Later it moved to the handheld market where it made a killing.

There are two codenames on the roadmap that tip up by the end of the year, related to portable and desktop graphics. The first one is set for the end of the 2006 and it is codenamed Muse.

This will effectively be a fifth-generation part, with programmable pixel and vertex shading but we don?t have any other additional details about it.

A second offering, codenamed Athena is the real thing based on SGX, supporting programmable Shaders. It is set for sometime in 2007 - later rather than sooner, we suggest

As Intel licensed Imagniation's MBX, it may also license the SGX core as well. We suspect Intel wants muscle its way into the discrete graphics. Might it be tempted towards these Muse and Athena cores.

We will keep our eyes open, especially now ATI and AMD have become one. µ

 

[BFG10K]

I hope they drop tile based rendering and fix their drivers.

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
I hope they drop tile based rendering and fix their drivers.

Why? TBR is used in current generation products and you don't even realize it. If I recall both ATI and NVIDIA products have TBR modes available to them.

PowerVR rocked back in the day.

 

[Avalon]

That would be cool if true.

 

[BFG10K]

TBR is used in current generation products and you don't even realize it. If I recall both ATI and NVIDIA products have TBR modes available to them.

What on Earth are you talking about? All current products are immediate mode renderers.

If you're talking about Xenos that's not the same thing.

 

[fr]

My first 3D accelerator was NEC PowerVR. I couldn't afford 3Dfx Voodoo at the time. They better make this one cheap or no one will buy it.

 

[atom]

Bad move on their part IMO. Their limited resources would be better put to use developing mobile parts where they are currently dominant. With ATi, nvidia, and even 3dlabs trying to get into the mobile graphics game they are going to have their hands full.

 

[Insomniator]

Does anyone think (or know even) if it is even possible for a 3rd discrete video card company to contend with nvidia and ati? I mean.. both ati and nvidia have as much resources as they could possibly get, which includes reseachers, marketers, fabs ect ect... so how could a smaller company compete at any price range? It just doesnt seem possible unless your like microsoft and can suddenly put half a billion dollars towards developing a new card...

 

[Auric]

More importantly, if the general industry consensus is that the discreet bidness is doomed then there's li'l point in trying to compete. Which is what ATI implied for two years out and thus to get in on the merging of GPU and CPU they had to raise capital for R&D and possibly aquire other companies or else seek to be aquired themselves.