PowerVR graphics headed back to the desktop ?

[NV55]

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33240


Power VR headed back to a desktop near you

Intel anyone?

By Fuad Abazovic: Tuesday 25 July 2006, 11:12
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

 

[AirRaid1500]

PowerVR hasn't been a player in the highend of the PC graphics industry
since the late 1990s.

then they became a player in the lower-end of the industry a few years
ago with Series 3
(Kyro, Kyro II)


PowerVR Series 4 (on-chip T&L, 4 pixel pipelines, early shaders) was
canceled years ago

elements of Series 4 went into the PowerVR MBX family ... MBX was a
mix of Series 3 and Series 4 technology.


Series 5 has been in development for ages. Series 6 has also been in
development for some time. but for years and years, there has been no
release of new PowerVR products for PCs.

the first appearance of Series 5 technology was in the new SGX graphics
family, for handhelds/handsets/mobile.


I'd be nice to have a third player in the highend graphics industry,
but I'm not holding my breath. however, I will say this, PowerVR
pretty much the only small graphics company that has survived collapse
or buy-out. okay, well PowerVR is owned by Imagination Technologies,
however it's been that way for many years.

now word of a desktop Series 5 chip, being demo'ed, has surfaced:

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=32275

supposedly 50% "faster" (whatever context that means?)
than existing Nvidia or ATI GPUs.