Imagination Technologies confirms design wins for all announced members of its industry-leading POWERVR SGX family

October 7, 2008 -- Imagination Technologies-the leader in mobile and embedded graphics-announces that design wins have been achieved for all announced members of the POWERVR SGX family, comprising the SGX520, SGX530, SGX531, SGX535 and SGX540. The family now ranges from the world’s smallest OpenGL ES 2.0 IP core up to the most powerful shader-based embedded graphics engine.

Says Hossein Yassaie, CEO, Imagination Technologies: "The embedded graphics market continues to expand, relentlessly demanding higher performance, scalable solutions. It's now not just industry leaders who are putting emphasis on accelerated graphics - advanced graphics sells products and drives compelling applications. Any silicon manufacturer with no plan to bring graphics acceleration to its roadmap is in a weak competitive position".

Imagination's partners for POWERVR SGX include Intel, NEC, Renesas, Samsung, Sigma Designs and Texas Instruments as well as a major OEM. POWERVR SGX535 and SGX530 are sampling or in volume production. SGX540 is licensed to more than five partners, and has taped out this quarter in multiple SoCs, while SGX531 and SGX520 are in design with several licensees. POWERVR graphics technology has become a defining force in next generation consumer and mobile products. Imagination is seeing growing momentum in its licensing business for SGX because its roadmap and underlying technology are recognised as the best.

Based on Imagination's history of working with many Tier 1 silicon vendors, OEMs and content developers for more than a decade, it has solved many of the key problems in creating and delivering a truly balanced architecture that is far more efficient in an embedded environment than other solutions. For example, Imagination has an architecture that can dynamically load balance processing resources even within a single frame where the ratio between vertex and pixel loads varies substantially - such as an image with clear sky in one corner, and complex high polygon models in another. POWERVR SGX Series5 architecture is the most efficient shader-based technology in terms of power, performance and silicon area. It brings together two of Imagination's key technological strengths - its many years of tile-based graphics experience, and its real-time multi-threaded processor technology – into the universal scalable shader engine (USSE™) based SGX architecture. This uniquely addresses the requirements of next generation embedded Operating Systems and applications that demand advanced scheduling and fast context switching capabilities.

Competing 'unified' shader-based architectures tend to be more simplistic, and suffer from inefficiencies and poor performance when integrated into SoCs. Non-unified architectures that use separate vertex and pixel processing units are inherently inefficient and cannot load balance to match real application requirements. They cannot achieve anything approaching the sustained throughput or efficient silicon utilisation, under all operating conditions, of the POWERVR SGX architecture.

Continues Yassaie: "Where our partners have conducted extensive detailed evaluations of our technology against our competitors, we win hands down. The POWERVR SGX Series5 architecture is years ahead of competitive designs, because of the underlying technology and the strength of our roadmap. And there’s much more to come".

About Imagination Technologies

Imagination Technologies Group plc (FTSE:IMG) - a leader in semiconductor System on Chip Intellectual Property (SoC IP) - creates and licenses market-leading embedded graphics, video and display accelerators, multi-threaded processors and multi-standard receiver technologies. These IP solutions are complemented by dynamic and extensive developer and middleware ecosystems. Target markets include digital radio and audio; mobile phone multimedia; personal media players (PMP); in-car navigation and driver information; personal navigation devices (PND); Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) and Mobile Internet Device (MID); digital TV & set-top box; and mobile TV. Its licensees include leading semiconductor and consumer electronics companies, as well as innovative leading edge start-up and fabless semiconductor companies. Imagination has corporate headquarters in the United Kingdom, with sales and R&D offices worldwide. See: www.imgtec.com.