Imagination Technologies' PowerVR IP Integrated by ARM into RealView Versatile Family of Development Systems

PowerVR® MBX Enables Next-Generation of Mobile Graphics Applications

October 15, 2003 - Imagination Technologies – a leader in system-on-chip intellectual property (SoC IP) – announces that ARM – the industry’s leading provider of 16/32-bit embedded RISC microprocessor solutions – has integrated PowerVR MBX graphics technology into a custom development chip which forms the basis of the new ARM® RealView® Versatile family of hardware development boards.

This family includes the first development board to support both the ARM926EJ-S™ PrimeXsys™ Platform, and PowerVR’s MBX 2D/3D graphics acceleration technology.

John Metcalfe, VP Business Development (PowerVR), Imagination Technologies said: “ARM's RealView Versatile family allows manufacturers to accelerate the design cycle for next generation Mobile phones and PDAs. These products will require PowerVR MBX's advanced graphics performance and capabilities for the applications needed to draw in new consumers and maintain the phone-replacement market. The RealView Versatile family lets manufacturers engage with software and application developers now to enable this vital content.”

Imagination Technologies expect that the PowerVR MBX technology, which is available for licensing from ARM, will become the leading graphics solution for next generation mobile computing and communication devices.

Alistair Greenhill, Director of Marketing for RealView Development Systems at ARM said: “The RealView Versatile family achieves high performance through use of a custom development chip. By integrating the PowerVR MBX alongside an ARM926EJ-S™ microprocessor, PrimeXsys Platform IP and other high performance IP, we can clearly demonstrate the benefits of the minimal external memory bandwidth requirements of the PowerVR architecture. RealView Versatile hardware development boards will give developers advanced access to the hardware required for the development of new, feature-rich gaming and multimedia services."

The ARM RealView Versatile Platform Baseboard provides an AMBA™ Multi-layer AHB prototyping environment which enables the multiple bus layers of the PrimeXsys™ Platform architecture to be routed to expansion logic, in which system developers’ own IP can be implemented. As well as PowerVR MBX, the board contains other IP around the ARM926EJ-S core, such as the ARM VFP9-S coprocessor, to provide a complete development system for high performance applications. The vector processing capability of the ARM VFP9-S coprocessor offers increased performance for imaging applications such as scaling, 2D and 3D transforms, font generation, and digital filters.

PowerVR MBX features 3D, 2D and video graphics processing in a small area with exceptionally low-power consumption. It maintains all of PowerVR’s features and advanced capabilities, which will allow the development of advanced graphic content for a new generation of mobile devices.

PowerVR MBX Features

PowerVR MBX includes all the features of the latest generation of PowerVR technology including:

• Scene Manager™ - seamless scene complexity management to support arbitrarily complex scenes in limited memory footprint applications
• FSAA4Free™ - full screen anti aliasing with no performance loss delivers a significant improvement in visual quality by using high resolution rendering and filtered scaling. The result is smoother, more realistic graphics at mobile resolutions
• ITC™ - Internal True Colour operations performed on chip at 32 bpp for superior colour precision
• PVR-TC™ - PowerVR Texture Compression
• AHB Interface for ARM bus architectures
• Optimisation for UMA (Unified Memory Architectures)

PowerVR MBX also enables all key 3D features, including: Flat and Gouraud shading; Perspective texturing and shading; Specular highlights; 2 Layer Multitexturing support; 32-bit Z/Stencil buffer; Full tile blend buffer; Effective fill rates that increase with 3D complexity; Per vertex fog; 16-bit textures; 32-bit textures; Point, bilinear, trilinear and anisotropic filtering; Full range of blend modes; Alpha test.

PowerVR Technologies designs 2D and 3D graphics technologies for use across a wide variety of consumer platforms, from games consoles, arcade machines and personal computers to mobile devices and set top boxes. The PowerVR approach to 3D graphics starts from the premise that taking a different algorithmic approach to 3D processing can eliminate all redundant processing and memory bottlenecks. This revolutionary approach keeps as much processing as possible on-chip minimising costly accesses to off chip memory and improving performance. This unique technique of tile-based deferred texturing has been successfully patented worldwide.

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