Mobile 3D
UK low-power graphics designer Imagination Technologies picked the British Embassy in South Korea to demonstrate, for the first time, that its POWERVR SGX embedded graphics cores are capable of delivering stereoscopic 3D (S3D) graphics.
Like ARM, Imagination's business model requires it to persuade SoC designers to license its designs and integrate them into their chips. The big difference between Imagination and ARM is that the latter's primary focus is on the CPU rather than GPU, and the two companies even used to cooperate with each other until ARM launched its Mali graphics designs.
Accordingly Imagination not only needs to demonstrate superiority to Mali but, on behalf of SoC partners like TI, superiority to chips like Qualcomm's Snapdragon and NVIDIA's Tegra, which develop their graphics cores in-house.
The timing of this demonstration seems to be especially pointed at NVIDIA, which chose to focus primarily on 3D - albeit on PCs rather than mobile devices - at the recent Computex show. Presumably NVIDIA will eventually want to talk-up the 3D capabilities of Tegra too, and Imagination seems to have beaten it to the punch.
"The additional workload required for S3D places significant additional demands on the graphics processor - and POWERVR SGX is more than up to the task," said marketing VP Tony King-Smith. "Given that the performance demands are significantly higher for S3D than conventional 3D applications, we felt it important to show our technology delivering full S3D experiences today using currently shipping silicon.
"As a result of our demonstrations we look forward to seeing S3D as another key feature used by a broader base of applications for mobile phones, DTVs, STBs and other products in the next few years."
