state of PowerVR Series 5

You will have to excuse the fact that this is off-topic for the ati,
nvidia groups, however I would argue that competition in the high end
PC graphics arena from PowerVR should impact the quality of sucessive
GPUs/VPUs from Nvidia and ATI.

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12637

quote:
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We've been following the progress of PowerVR'5 Series 5 graphics
technology for some time, often wondering if it will actually reach
the market and if so how – given PowerVR's reluctance to do anything
along the fab-less semiconductor business model, instead stick purely
to an IP model. With no semiconductor licensee's it appeared that
Series 5 would stall, however last time we saw news of Series 5 it
was. We presume, for an announced deal with SEGA's arcade division.

More recently Imagination Technologies, the parent company of PowerVR,
has put out a new financial statement and within that a few references
have been made to the progress of state of Series 5. Here are a few
elements of the statement that may be pertienent:
" We are close to delivering our very high-end next generation
graphics technology that targets arcade, PC and console. We have
already licensed this technology to SEGA for use in arcade systems and
intend to explore relevant partnerships for other markets."

"Developments with Renesas/Sammy, and the latest SEGA partnership are
expected to lead to volume shipments in the amusement machine market
starting from the second half of this year and early next year
respectively."

"5 partner devices in or close to production (compared with only one
in production at the beginning of FY03/04) and 2 in prototype
silicon;"
So, it would seem that in the second half of the year, which begins
fairly soon, PowerVR will be ready to show of Series 5 in an arcade
guise at least, however given their business model this still leaves
some questions as to how, if at all, this will be brought to the PC
market without any semiconductor licensees – if PowerVR are reluctant
to go to a fables semiconductor it may be a tall order to ask a board
vendor to become one by effectively paying for the production
themselves and giving royalties back to PowerVR. Hopefully, though,
this will still prove to be an interesting solution and something can
be worked out.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Glad to hear PowerVr are still alive.
I really loved my Kyro2 64mb card back then. It cost halv of what Gf2 was
going for and still had decent performance.
I loved those 16bit depth quality tough.. just as good as 32bit. So many old
games using 16bit max looked better with that card.

Now if only they put on TnL unit, DX8 features and DDR2 ram to that
interface, it would still outperform any Radeon9200se/Fx5200/Ti4200 cards at
hopefully much less price.

As for next gen, I'd love to see Kyro4 with 128mb GDDR2, 4x2 pipeline,
ShaderModel 3 support. With TBR interface (TileBaseRendering), that card
will be real threat to 9800/5900 series of cards. May even challenge x800
and 6800 cards if it gets a faster pipelines (hopefully 8x2 .

"R420" <radeonr420.TakeThisOut@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:51488ce2.0405241248.136aee95@posting.google.com...
 > You will have to excuse the fact that this is off-topic for the ati,
 > nvidia groups, however I would argue that competition in the high end
 > PC graphics arena from PowerVR should impact the quality of sucessive
 > GPUs/VPUs from Nvidia and ATI.
 >
<font color=purple> > <a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12637</font" target="_blank">http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12637</font</a>>
 >
 > quote:
 >
____________________________________________________________________________
___
 > We've been following the progress of PowerVR'5 Series 5 graphics
 > technology for some time, often wondering if it will actually reach
 > the market and if so how - given PowerVR's reluctance to do anything
 > along the fab-less semiconductor business model, instead stick purely
 > to an IP model. With no semiconductor licensee's it appeared that
 > Series 5 would stall, however last time we saw news of Series 5 it
 > was. We presume, for an announced deal with SEGA's arcade division.
 >
 > More recently Imagination Technologies, the parent company of PowerVR,
 > has put out a new financial statement and within that a few references
 > have been made to the progress of state of Series 5. Here are a few
 > elements of the statement that may be pertienent:
 > " We are close to delivering our very high-end next generation
 > graphics technology that targets arcade, PC and console. We have
 > already licensed this technology to SEGA for use in arcade systems and
 > intend to explore relevant partnerships for other markets."
 >
 > "Developments with Renesas/Sammy, and the latest SEGA partnership are
 > expected to lead to volume shipments in the amusement machine market
 > starting from the second half of this year and early next year
 > respectively."
 >
 > "5 partner devices in or close to production (compared with only one
 > in production at the beginning of FY03/04) and 2 in prototype
 > silicon;"
 > So, it would seem that in the second half of the year, which begins
 > fairly soon, PowerVR will be ready to show of Series 5 in an arcade
 > guise at least, however given their business model this still leaves
 > some questions as to how, if at all, this will be brought to the PC
 > market without any semiconductor licensees - if PowerVR are reluctant
 > to go to a fables semiconductor it may be a tall order to ask a board
 > vendor to become one by effectively paying for the production
 > themselves and giving royalties back to PowerVR. Hopefully, though,
 > this will still prove to be an interesting solution and something can
 > be worked out.
 >
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