06/26, 7:30am
Apple Boosts Imag Stake
Apple today dramatically increased its stake in PowerVR graphics designer Imagination Technologies through a purchase of a total of 13.72 million extra shares. The move, which includes both 2.2 million extra shares as well as 11.52 million shares on the existing market, well over doubles the original 3.6 percent stake bought late last year to 9.5 percent. It's believed the extra investment is a reaction to Intel, which last week increased its own stake a second time to 14 percent.
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04/27, 2:05pm
Apple Hires ATI CTO
Apple has quietly signaled a new emphasis on graphics by hiring an influential graphics chipset designer from AMD. The former CTO for the company's ATI graphics product group, Bob Drebin, has indicated on his LinkedIn profile that he is now a Senior Director for an unnamed group within Apple. What products he covers are unknown, though in addition to leading GPU engineering at ATI since 2000, he also spent significant time developing products at Silicon Graphics and, during a 2-year span at ArtX, helped create the "Flipper" GPU that formed the heart of the Nintendo GameCube.
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03/18, 3:25pm
PowerVR SGX543MP
Imagination Technologies fulfilled early promises by detailing its first multi-core, smartphone-class graphics chip in the PowerVR SGX 5XTSeries. The SGX543MP is now known to come in at least a dual-core version and scales up to 16 cores depending on the version; the change lets the graphics scale from low-power devices like small phones up to gaming consoles and other very 3D-intensive devices.
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02/12, 9:55am
HP Joins Symbian Found
Nokia today bolstered the Symbian Foundation with the addition of multiple key new members. HP, MySpace and SanDisk lead the new sign-ons and each have their own different reasons for joining the open-source mobile OS project. HP hopes to improve its support for managing Symbian; MySpace hopes to further refine its MySpace app for the phone throuhg the open code; SanDisk hopes to improve the use of storage for multimedia apps. None of the three has given clues as to how soon products will appear that take advantage of Foundation membership.
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01/09, 9:15am
PowerVR SGX543 and iPhone
Imagination Technologies has quietly introduced a new PowerVR SGX chipset at CES that may point to the future of the iPhone and other graphics-intensive smartphones. The PowerVR SGX543 is the first to use a new platform which its creator estimates is much faster than older SGX and MBX chips. Its new, more vector-friendly graphics engine is about 40 percent faster than the previous SGX series in very effects-heavy graphics, the company claims, and is much faster in floating point math, geometry setup, and culling unneeded parts of the scene than the previous generation.
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12/23, 7:45am
Intel Stake in Imagination
Intel has countered Apple's investment in Imagination Technologies with an increased stake of its own. The semiconductor maker says it has bought just over 6.9 million shares in Britain-based Imagination to gain a 3.04 percent stake in the company and warns in a required statement that it may respond to any bid to acquire the company with a counter offer of its own, though it adds that there is no immediate intention to launch a takeover itself.
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12/18, 11:10am
Apple buys into IMG
Apple has made a heavy investment into another chip manufacturer, according to an announcement. The company has bought 8.2 million shares in the Imagination Technologies Group, giving it a ownership stake of 3.6 percent. IMG is perhaps best known for producing the PowerVR series of chips, used to accelerate graphics in mobile devices; as a result, Apple may now be in a position to use the chips in future iPods and iPhones, or else some unknown device.
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09/04, 6:25pm
Imagination signs deal
System-on-a-Chip manufacturer Imagination Technologies on Thursday unveiled it has signed a multi-year licensing deal with an anonymous "international electronics systems company" which could confirm earlier rumors regarding Apple. In April, Imagination was found to be exploring a secret licensing deal with Apple, a move that would let Apple have exclusive distribution rights to its PowerVR SGX chipset, and access to the Imagination's video IP cores.
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04/30, 8:30pm
PowerVR SGX-based iPhone
Apple could have exclusive rights to a new 3D chip for its next incarnation from Imagination Technologies – the company behind the current device's Samsung-constructed graphics platform. AppleInsider reveals that the processor manufacturer entered into a secret licensing deal with Apple last July to supply the latter with its new graphics chipset, the PowerVR SGX. Samsung is currently licensing the SGX design for manufacture.
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