POWERVR AND ARM BRING CONSOLE QUALITY GAMING TO MOBILES

October 19th 2004: London, UK: Imagination Technologies - a leader in system-on-chip intellectual property - is demonstrating advanced hardware graphics support for ARM based embedded systems with its PowerVR MBX graphics core at the ARM Developer Conference in Santa Clara, CA, October 19 - 21 2004.

The event at the Santa Clara Convention Center will feature a presentation by PowerVR's Nicolas Thibieroz on Wednesday 20th October titled 'Advanced OpenGL ES Effects With the PowerVR MBX VGP.'

PowerVR MBX embedded graphics technology will be demonstrated at the event with particular emphasis on how MBX and its companion Vertex Geometry Processor enable advanced graphics features previously found exclusively in the desktop space - such as per-pixel lighting, cel shading, vertex skinning and spherical harmonics - to be migrated to mobile devices. PowerVR MBX is ready to enable a content revolution in mobile gaming.

Says John Metcalfe, VP Business Development (PowerVR), Imagination Technologies: "PowerVR MBX has an industry leading feature set for mobile graphics including skinning, FSAA, internal 32-bit precision, T&L, Dot3 per pixel lighting, curved surface support and texture compression. With the first PowerVR MBX enabled devices now shipping this is the ideal time to bring PowerVR, which has already been adopted as the de facto standard for mobile graphics by the world's leading semiconductor manufacturers, to a wider audience in the development community."

PowerVR MBX has already been licensed to leading semiconductor manufacturers utilising ARM processor technology including Intel, Philips, Samsung, Sunplus and Texas Instruments, and is available for licensing direct from Imagination Technologies or from ARM. Processors integrating PowerVR MBX already announced include Intel's 2700G and TI's OMAP2 2410 and 2420.

PowerVR MBX enables the migration of complex 3D/2D graphics and video content to mobile platforms. MBX has all the inherent benefits of the PowerVR architecture, including low memory bandwidth, exceptional performance, market leading image quality and low power demands.

PowerVR Vertex Geometry Processor (VGP) is a high-performance, fully programmable floating-point SIMD coprocessor carefully matched to the requirements of PowerVR MBX. Designed for optimal 3D Transformation and Lighting (T&L), with an instruction set carefully designed to allow common T&L operations to be performed in a minimal number of instructions, the VGP offloads these highly computer intensive tasks from the host CPU.

This ARM event brings all third parties / partners together in one place. The very latest in ARM cores, development tools, software, compute engines are being featured. This event spotlights ARM partners - from SoC solutions to MCUs and ASSPs, hot new applications from software companies designing on ARM, to the latest OS development, tools and methodologies.

Editor's Notes

Download the latest PowerVR MBX screenshots here:ftp://praccess:Acce55@transfer.imgtec.com.

The ChameleonMan demo shows a Matrix Skinned Character in combination with DOT3 Per Pixel Lighting. Matrix Skinning is the act of animating a vertex over time given a set (Palette) of matrices and a known set of blend weights assigned to those matrices.

The PhantomMask Demo uses Spherical Harmonic Lighting, a real-time rendering technique that uses a pre-process step - the projection of the lights, of the model and of the transfer function onto the spherical harmonic basis - to realistically render scenes using any type of light source. It is primarily used to reproduce diffuse lighting.

Cel-Shading is the "art" of rendering objects to look like cartoons. The Mouse demo shows a dancing mouse with a hard black outline and banded shading to achieve the desired cartoon-look. Both effects are setup using an optimised vertex shader program.

About Imagination Technologies

Imagination Technologies Group plc - a leader in SoC IP - develops, licenses and supplies market-leading graphics/video cores, real-time multi-threaded DSP/RISC processors and communication and broadcast technologies for the consumer entertainment and PC markets. It supplies both licensable IP (Intellectual Property) and related advanced development tools to leading semiconductor and consumer electronics companies worldwide. Imagination Technologies Group plc has its corporate headquarters in the United Kingdom and is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange (FTSE:IMG). See: www.imgtec.com.

About PowerVR

PowerVR - a division of Imagination Technologies - develops and markets the unique PowerVR graphics/video technology. Existing partners licensing the technology include Frontier Silicon, Intel, Renesas, Samsung, SEGA, Sharp, Sunplus, Texas Instruments, NEC, and STMicroelectronics. See: www.powervr.com.

Contact:

David Harold

PowerVR

Imagination Technologies

tel +44 (0)1923 260 511

fax +44 (0)1923 270 188

email: david.harold@powervr.com

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