New Chip Spells iPhone HD?


Imagination Technologies has announced a new graphics processor IP core – the PowerVR SGX543.

The UK-based company is the designer of the PowerVR MBX hardware used in the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Its new four-pipeline SGX543 is expected to be able to support HD resolution video and graphics output.

The chip is to be available in both single core and multi-processor solutions.

The new design improves upon Imagination’s Universal Scalable Shader Engine (USSE) that was first incorporated into earlier PowerVR SGX designs.

The company said the new technology – dubbed USSE2 – is a multi-threaded GPU shader processing engine that’s incorporated into each of the design’s four pipelines.

It said USSE2 incorporates a major upgrade of the data path to deliver vastly improved vector processing performance and overall throughput.

Imagination claims the SGX543 can achieve performance of 35 million polygons per second and a pixel fill rate of one gigapixel per second when running at 200MHz.

The technology also provides advanced colour space handling and gamma correction to ensure that each of those polygons and pixels are displayed in vivid and accurate color.

As with all members of the PowerVR SGX line, the SGX543 supports the OpenGL ES 2.0 standard for programmable 3D graphics.

Last year Apple purchased a 3.6 per cent stake in Imagination for USD $4.8m.

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