Imagination Technologies and the return to the world of desktop video cards

Celebrating 30 years of architecture PowerVR, Imagitionation Technologies ha made the point on his past but also on his future. And it is on the latter in particular that it is worth focusing on. In 2017 the Canyon Bridge investment fund acquired the British company and has since opened a new chapter with the development of a new PowerVR architecture.

Internally called GPU19he asked 18 months of work to be finalized. That work resulted in the market in the “IMG A-Series“, thanks to which the company obtained the first licensing agreement in over 20 years for desktop GPUs, an area where “many thought we would never return”. Among the features of the new project a redesigned ALU, HyperLane virtualization technology and AI Sinergy.

The company then has signed in 2020 a new multi-year license agreement with Apple, thanks to which the company led by Tim Cook can access a wide range of intellectual property of Imagination Technologies in exchange for money. These developments gave the company what it needed to continue on the path that led to the GPU IMG B-Series.

The family, consisting of three levels – BXE, BXM and BXT – was well received and in particular the solution BXT was selected by the Chinese Innosilicon for the line of desktop Fantasy (Fenghua). According to Imagination Technologies, the BXT range delivers four times the raw performance of the A-Series.

Innosilicon has currently introduced a video card with BXT-32-1024 GPU manufactured at 12nm by SMIC called “Type-A“, complete with 16 GB of GDDR6X memory on 128-bit bus for a computing power of 5 TFLOPs. There would also be a solution on the way “Type-B“, con two BXT GPUs on a single PCB to double the performance.

And Imagination Technologies, non pair, ha a new GPU is already in the pipeline call IMG CXT, based on Photon architecture He is able to manage ray tracing in real time. Architecture will also be the basis of mobile solutions. According to the company, Photon is capable of handling RT technology with unprecedented efficiency and we will see it on the market in 2023since the company has already signed a license agreement.

So even though NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel can sleep soundly now, the desktop GPU industry has an old participant, one that many old enthusiasts will fondly remember. It is difficult to say today if Imagination Technologies will break the eggs in the basket of today’s giants, but we will certainly follow their steps, for now linked only to China but in the future who knows …