Imagination Tech at CES 2013
January, 2013, CES, Las Vegas—We talked with Imagination Technologies about all the changes in the products in the last quarter. The first statement was that their CEO, Hossein Yassaie, has been awarded a knighthood by the Queen in Her Majesty’s New Year Honors 2013. The award was given in recognition of his services to industry.
First, the PowerVR series of GPUs is extended through a set of APIs to enable more high-end applications. Specifically OEMs, semiconductor partners and developers using PowerVR Series5XT powered platforms that have these optional OpenGL ES 2.0 extensions enabled, can have access to some of the key features of next generation APIs, such as OpenGL ES 3.0, on today’s technology. The API extensions provide features such as: multiple render targets; occlusion queries; seamless cube maps; sampler access from vertex shaders; floating point textures; GLSL full-precision floating point; R and RG textures; min/max blends; and multisample render buffers. The new extensions are being delivered to all PowerVR Series5XT licensees as part of the standard PowerVR graphics DDK (device driver development kit).
More processing capabilities enable enhanced graphics performance. The PowerVR GPU cores are designed to offer from 100GFLOPS to more than 1 TFLOP, enabling high-level graphics and GPU Compute performance from mobile through to high-end compute and graphics solutions, such as the latest high resolution TVs. The GPUs support all of the major video standards as well as additional functions like transcode, display surfaces, and mosaic screens.
To complete the picture, their MetaFlow Connected Processor platforms for the connected home combine a Meta processor, Ensigma connectivity, and Flow Cloud technologies to offer a complete technology platform for connected home products.
Meta CPU technology is a range of general purpose embedded 32-bit processors. Unique hardware multi-threading and DSP capabilities enable Meta processors to bring together a hardware multi-threaded CPU architecture (with optional 32-bit DSP capability), Ensigma RPU-based full 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth communications processor, and Flow cloud and portal technologies. Flow is a portfolio of cloud connectivity technologies that enable the Internet of Things to be fully cloud-connected.
Ensigma RPUs support all key standards for connectivity including 802.11abgn, MIMO, 802.11n, MIMO 802.11ac, (Complete, Fully Embedded, or Thin MAC with simultaneous Bluetooth). They also enable global chassis broadcast products with TV standards including DVB-T2, DVB-T, ISDB-T, SBTVD, ATSC, GB20600-2006 (CTTB), DVB-S2,DVB-S,ISDB-S, DVB-C2, DVB-C, J.83B, ISDB-C; Analogue TV; Mobile TV including DVB-H, T-DMB, 1-Seg ISDB-T; and Radio standards including DAB/DAB+, HD Radio, 3-seg ISDB-T, ISDB-Tmm, DRM, FM, AM.
In addition to the hardware, they also offer HelloSoft Rich Communication Suite (RCS). These communications technologies enable advanced features such as enriched voice and video calling with multimedia content sharing capabilities, enhanced address book/contacts, and messaging (SMS/MMS).
