Wizards!

Exciting stuff today from IMG. According to HY this is when 'the magic happens':

http://www.imgtec.com/News/Release/index.asp?NewsID=853

Disruptive technology enables interactive cinematic realism for mainstream devices

Game Developers Conference, San Francisco, CA – 18 March, 2014 –

 Imagination Technologies (IMG.L) delivers a revolutionary new family of graphics IP cores that raises the bar for ray traced graphics to a dramatic new level, delivering astonishing realism and performance at mobile power budgets.

Wizard cores enable more immersive games and apps with real-life dynamic lighting models that enable advanced lighting effects, dynamic soft shadows, and life-like reflections and transparencies, previously unachievable in a mobile form factor. PowerVR Wizard Ray Tracing IP is highly scalable, making it disruptive to many other markets beyond mobile.

The new PowerVR Wizard graphics architecture is a significant addition to the lineup of market-leading PowerVR graphics processors (GPUs), which are already present in over half of the world’s smartphones and tablets.

The Wizard architecture is a ray tracing-enabled version of the PowerVR Series6XT Rogue architecture which adds significant new features to the pipeline, enabling accurate real time modelling of fully dynamic lights and shadows. Everything developers know and love about the PowerVR Rogue architecture is present in Wizard GPUs, enabling them to start to use ray tracing without extensive new learning.

PowerVR GR6500 is the first member of the new Wizard family of cores designed to bring real-time, interactive ray traced graphics to a broad range of consumer and mobile platforms, as well as gaming consoles and mainstream gaming PCs, workstations and servers.

Hossein Yassaie, president and CEO of Imagination, says: “Imagination’s highly-efficient PowerVR GPUs have played a key role in driving the creation of entirely new categories of mobile devices. Now we are changing the game again by bringing the next level of realism to mobile and consumer devices. Our ray tracing IP is here, and it’s ready for our licensees and developers to begin creating a new wave of immersive and exciting PowerVR-based consumer experiences.”

Highly anticipated IP poised to transform the state-of-the-art in graphics

Enabling ray tracing capability in consumer devices required a fundamental breakthrough in the algorithms used within ray tracing, as well as the careful addition of optimized fixed function blocks in the GPU to allow ray tracing operations to be performed within the power consumption and bandwidth budgets available in today’s mainstream consumer devices.

With Imagination’s Wizard Ray Tracing family, patented custom hardware engines ensure the GPU’s processor clusters are kept free to run sophisticated shaders, producing stunning results with minimal developer effort. The unique hardware ray tracing processors, including coherence gathering engines, fixed function intersection testing array and accelerated scene hierarchy generator, receive rays from the shaders, determines their intersection and initiates more shaders. All of this is made possible with entirely dynamic scenes through the addition of a novel hardware pipeline to build scene hierarchies required for ray tracing in parallel with other operations, all while remaining compatible with existing programmable vertex operations.

With all of these additions, Wizard cores address the real-world use cases of ray tracing with fully interactive dynamic content and photorealistic lighting. The net effect is an architecture that can perform ray tracing operations around 100 times as efficiently as performing the same operation using GPGPU functionality.

PowerVR GR6500 delivers:

• Ray tracing: 300 MRPS (million rays per second) and 100 MDTPS (million dynamic triangles per second) at 600 MHz
• Shading: Four Unified Shading Clusters (USCs), with 128 ALU cores delivering in excess of 150 GFLOPS (FP32) or 300 GFLOPS (FP16) at 600 MHz
• PowerGearing G6XT for advanced power management and dynamic resource allocation
• PVR3C™ triple compression technologies (PVRTC and ASTC for texture compression, PVRIC for frame buffer compression, PVRGC for geometry compression)
• Deep Color support for very high image quality at Ultra HD resolutions and beyond

Through the advanced architecture of PowerVR Wizard, multiple ray tracing engines and shaders operate concurrently to ensure real world sustained performance for both ray tracing and shading.

Further cores will follow that offer smaller power and area footprints for more constrained environments, along with scaled up cores to deliver fully ray traced content for the ultimate in cinema quality graphics. All Wizard cores are designed to provide leading support for a range of APIs such as OpenGL ES 3.x, OpenGL 3.x, Direct3D 11 Level 10_0, OpenCL 1.x, and OpenRL 1.x.

PowerVR Ray tracing: creating new opportunities for developers

In addition to the clear benefits for traditional game engines through the easy addition of many high quality and dynamic shadows, reflections, transparencies, global-lighting, ambient occlusion and more, PowerVR Wizard GPUs can enable a broad range of other capabilities that would either be impossible, low quality or too inefficient using standard techniques. Examples include lens distortion correction, lenticular display rendering, multi-perspective rendering, targeted rendering to points of interest, line-of-sight calculations, collision detection and more.

The combination of efficient shading clusters and low-bandwidth ray tracing will enable a giant step forward for developers, who can bring a new level of quality and enhanced realism to their apps and games. For example, ray tracing can add a superior shadowing or lighting solution to existing games while allowing game developers to preserve the vast majority of the investment that they have already made in their game engines and tools. In addition, dynamic generation of assets in-game will streamline the content creation workflow and save distribution costs by reducing the size of the game files.

David Helgason, CEO of Unity Technologies says: “Unity integrated Imagination’s ray tracing software into the Unity 5 editor due to its high performance on the broadest range of consumer laptops, ease of integration and unique future hardware roadmap. We will continue to work with Imagination to fully utilize the PowerVR Ray Tracing GPU IP within the Unity game engine to further enhance the in-game experience and simplify content creation for our developers.”

James McCombe, director of research for PowerVR Ray Tracing at Imagination, says: “While PowerVR Wizard ray tracing GPUs are a disruptive technology, they remain as familiar and easy to use as the PowerVR GPUs that developers are already using. With PowerVR Wizard IP, the ray tracing capabilities are exposed directly through the existing programmable shading hardware, so that software developers can take advantage of the ultra-fast ray tracing for some effects, while continuing to leverage the substantial investment in software designed to run on GPUs already available in the market today.”

Matt Pharr, co-author of ‘Physically Based Rendering, from Theory to Implementation’ and Academy Award Honoree, says: “The PowerVR Wizard architecture from Imagination is a remarkable advance: it promises to deliver both high-performance and energy-efficient ray tracing to developers, in the context of a regular GPU that can rasterize efficiently and still has high-performance shader cores. By making ray tracing available to all developers that use this platform, the Wizard architecture offers the possibility of a quantum leap forward in image quality in mobile interactive graphics applications.”

While power-efficient enough for mobile applications, the PowerVR Wizard architecture is able to scale up to configurations capable of rendering interactive cinema for high-end gaming machines and consumer devices.

Says Yasuhiro Kondo, general manager, Arcade Machine Development, SEGA Co Ltd.: “SEGA welcomes the announcement of PowerVR Ray Tracing IP from Imagination Technologies. We expect that the Wizard cores will create a great revolution in the graphics experience of the gaming market.”

Availability

The PowerVR Wizard GR6500 core is available for licensing now. Contact info@imgtec.com for more information.

Imagination IMS

Imagination put out the H2 IMS today. As predicted by most ,the licensing will miss the £38-43m forecast, even though it is very strong at present. The royalty volume forecast is further reduced due mainly to Mediatek using Mali for its current generation (will turn around in FY15).On the plus side costs are being better managed and there is a Tier 1 win for MIPS new cores - that is clearly deserving of a separate rns and may come later on in the year. Most are now focussed on FYs 15,16 when we should see a return to growth across multiple fronts.

Imagination Technologies Group plc ('Imagination', LSE: IMG), a leading multimedia, processor and communications technology company, is today issuing its Interim Management Statement for the period from 1 November 2013 to 5 March 2014.

Trading update

The Group has continued to develop and make good progress in its strategy of providing the key processor IP cores needed for the broadest range of System-on-Chips (SoC) and the markets they target.

Unit shipments have been behind expectations due to a slower rate of smartphone market growth and lower market share in the entry level segment of that market. However, based on recent design wins and partner product launches, we expect this share to recover in the latter part of FY15. The revenue impact of share loss in the entry level segment has been lessened due to the lower royalties on these units. Indeed the average royalty rate achieved is ahead of our expectations.

Licensing activity remains high with a large number of opportunities being progressed across all of the IP product groups. Progress so far in H2 has been encouraging including development and extensions of some strategic and long-term relationships. One of the characteristics of the sales pipeline this year compared with previous years is the number and breadth of opportunities. They cover a far wider range of customers and a broader mix across all of our IP products. While this helps to reduce the dependency on specific customers / products, there is still the usual uncertainty in precise timing of deal closure.

The Pure business performance has been steady with revenues from the Jongo range of wireless speakers offsetting weaker performance in the DAB market.

We have continued to manage the operating cost base with increased rigour. In particular, synergies from acquisitions and across our geographical resources have been greater than previously expected and this has resulted in significant additional efficiencies and cost savings against our plan.

Technology

Multimedia
Our PowerVR Series6 technology has seen significant further deployment in the market with multiple partners now shipping devices using this technology in all key segments. This was increasingly visible at the recent major industry event, Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2014. Recent benchmarks measuring performance, power and area show significant benefits, delivered by this market leading technology, compared with all competition.

We recently announced further GPU cores based on the Series6 technology for both Series6XT and also Series6XE. These cores bring the benefits of Series6 to a broader range of customer requirements from entry level to market leading high-end. Series6XE in particular delivers strong performance per square millimetre and feature set, providing exceptional products targeting the entry level smartphone / tablet and wearables markets. Series6XT is demonstrably leading the market in mainstream and high-end segments. We have seen and continue to see strong interest in and licensing of this technology.

We have recently launched our first IP core, PowerVR V2500, in the Raptor imaging processor family which works closely with our PowerVR video and graphics cores to provide enhanced camera functionality and tighter integration. The vision capability is increasingly becoming a very important aspect of many categories of devices in many market segments from smartphones to the Internet of Things (IoT).

We will make further product announcements involving our ray tracing technology later this month.

CPU and processor cores
Progress with development of the Warrior range of cores, which was initiated following the MIPS acquisition, has been strong with the launch, in February 2014, of the new MIPS Warrior M-class cores. These are the world's first MCU-class CPU IP cores with hardware virtualization and next generation security capabilities. We have now launched two performance/feature categories, P-class and M-class cores, from the new MIPS Warrior family. Significantly we have already secured licenses for these new cores.  Development of further cores, including 64-bit processors, within the Warrior family is progressing rapidly.

Customer engagements regarding MIPS processors continue very positively, with a number of new agreements signed including with a Tier 1 customer using latest generation MIPS for the first time.

The emerging market segment of wearable devices is set to be a very active one for MIPS with several partners already engaged and others in the pipeline. We are also seeing genuine interest and early traction for the MIPS Warrior family for the mobile market.

The progress on MIPS is very encouraging and has made a positive contribution to the business. We re-iterate that this is a long-term strategy to offer real choice in the CPU and processor IP market.

Communications
The relevance and interest of our communications IP has increased further, with a significant number of licensing opportunities in the sales pipeline. Of particular note is the number of customers interested in combining this with our other technologies, such as MIPS processors, or our PowerVR graphics and video solutions, as evidenced by the recent product announcement from Toshiba.

We have signed licenses with a number of partners for our Caskeid multi-room wireless audio technology, which also powers Pure Jongo wireless speakers, and have a number of further prospects in progress. This offering combines our Ensigma connectivity, MIPS processors and our market leading wireless synchronisation technology.

Cloud technologies
FlowCloud is a key software technology for enabling IoT opportunities. Its availability to our customers can enable faster time to volume product shipments. There is growing customer recognition of the market opportunity and relevance of this technology to many key established and emerging markets including audio and video content delivery, home automation, healthcare, security and the many other IoT opportunities seen widely at the recent CES and MWC international trade shows.

Pure
We have continued the development and launch of a number of strategic products and technologies that showcase the technology and capabilities of the Group and help to secure new business opportunities. There are a number of ongoing discussions with partners looking to utilise these technologies as demonstrated by the recent announcement with Onkyo.

Outlook
With the encouraging high level of licensing opportunities in the pipeline and deals closed so far we expect licensing revenue for the current year to be significantly stronger than last year and gaining momentum. When we consider the timing of deal closure in this final quarter however, we expect licensing revenue to be in the range of £35m - £40m.

Based on our view of existing partner shipments and new products which are starting to ship, we expect total unit shipments to be in excess of 1.2bn units in the financial year to 30 April 2014. Excluding MIPS, we now expect 520m - 550m units. There are a number of new partners that have just started or will start shipment over the coming months and new design wins with existing partners which will contribute to unit volume growth in FY15.

We expect to see a financial improvement in the Pure division over the medium term, driven by the new Jongo product range.

Based on the higher levels of synergies and rigorous cost management, we now expect the underlying operating costs for FY14 to be significantly lower than previous guidance (£135m - £137m) and within the range £127m - £131m. The investments we have made in the operating cost base over the last few years have strengthened the R&D capabilities significantly and have equipped us to deliver to our plans. As a result, our expectations for underlying operating costs for FY15 are for a much lower rate of growth.

The financial position of Imagination remains robust and the Board is confident that the Group's progress will continue.

Hossein Yassaie, Imagination's Chief Executive said:

"We continue to focus on building sustainable and long-term value in our business, despite the transient events that are inevitable in the dynamic markets in which we operate.

"Our strategy to develop and exploit disruptive technologies in our three main areas of IP – multimedia, processors and communications – has made good progress. Significantly this strategy has now reached a stage that it is enabling us to start offering our customers solution-centric platforms that they value.

"Our strong technology base and the platforms they are enabling, the expanding partner engagements and the growing design wins across a broader range of markets give us confidence that we have significant opportunities and growth potential ahead."

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