The company behind the PowerVR graphic processor unit used in Apple’s mobile devices has announced that six key partners have started licensing their next-generation GPUs, but Apple’s name isn’t on the list -- yet.
MacRumors is reporting that Imagination Technologies has announced six key partners that will be licensing their upcoming PowerVR Series 6 GPU, codenamed “Rogue.” Announced partners include ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, MediaTek and three “yet to be announced” licensees, one of which will presumably be Apple.
The presumption is an easy one to make, since Apple is not only a longtime customer of Imagination Technologies’ GPU chips, but is also an investor with 9.5 percent ownership of the company since 2009. All of Apple’s iOS mobile devices currently utilize the PowerVR GPU, including the latest iPad 2, which Apple claims has graphics nine times faster than the original model thanks to Imagination’s SGX543MP2 GPU.
“The POWERVR Series6 GPU family, which delivers unrivalled GFLOPS per mm2 and per mW for all APIs, delivers not only a clear technology advantage and exceptional roadmap, driven by one of the largest teams of graphics engineers in the world, but also an extensive ecosystem of third party developers which has created hundreds of thousands of apps optimised for POWERVR enabled devices to date,” the company’s press release announced.
MacRumors notes that the new GPU will be backward compatible with the existing PowerVR SGX currently used in the iPhone and iPad, which means that Apple will have a relatively easy process to implement the latest version in future hardware.
Unfortunately, the announcement won’t mean much for the near future: Because the processor, GPU and RAM are all tied together, the latest PowerVR GPU isn’t likely to be implemented until next year when Apple will presumably introduce an A6 processor, most likely with the iPad 3 in the first quarter of 2012.
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