Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in
Imagination's Quest To Provide A Third Major Mobile Platform
By ,
1. Introduction To Imagination Technologies

Headquartered in the UK, Imagination Technologies was founded in 1985 under the name VideoLogic. The company started out by focusing on graphics, sound acceleration, home audio systems, video capture, and video conferencing systems. A year after it went public in 1995, VideoLogic started licensing its PowerVR GPU IP to NEC, and by 1997, NEC owned 3.5% of the company.

Realizing what a lucrative business it had discovered, VideoLogic refocused on licensing intellectual property products in 1999, changing its name to Imagination Technologies.

In the next couple of years, Imagination started expanding. It acquired Ensigma and Cross Products Limited, two companies that were working on digital signal processing technology. In 2006, Imagination won a big-name client, Intel, which then proceeded to use the PowerVR graphics IP in its Atom processors.

Just two years later, Imagination won another big customer called Apple. The partnership with Apple has been Imagination’s most profitable business, since its revenues grew along with the popularity of iPhones and iPads. Those devices were using PowerVR-sourced GPUs from the beginning.

Imagination has acquired several more companies in the past few years, but two of the more notable ones are Caustic Graphics, a developer of real-time ray tracing graphics technology, which led to Imagination’s launch of the “Wizard” hybrid GPU, and MIPS Technologies, which could help Imagination become a major player in the CPU space, too.

IP Product Categories

Currently, Imagination offers multiple IP products, including most of what a chip-maker would need to build its own SoC. This includes: CPU cores, GPU cores, the imaging signal processor, audio engine, RPU (radio processing unit), VPU (video encoding and decoding accelerator), and an NPU (for networking and security).

All of that technology is internal to an SoC. However, the company also sells IP products that are external, such as: 2G/3G/4G modems, power management microcontrollers, GLONASS microcontrollers, as well as smart card microcontrollers.

Imagination seems intent on becoming a “one-stop shop” for platform designers, perhaps even more so than ARM, which so far has been mainly focused on CPU and GPU cores, security modules, and only recently started selling designs for video accelerators with the arrival of Mali-V500.

Markets

While Imagination is known for offering IP products in the graphics market, it’s also involved in automotive, wearables, home entertainment (smart TV, consoles, etc), networking, and computer vision.

Imagination is optimizing its products for each market's individual needs. For example, the high-end mobile space requires exceptional performance and cutting-edge features, while the wearable market needs smaller processors and more targeted feature sets.

By offering its customers exactly what they want without any excess features, Imagination hopes to offer more sensible pricing than its competitors, while simultaneously making it easier to deal with a wider array of specific space and power constraints.

2. The Mobile Line-Up

The mobile market is a gold mine for successful chip-makers, but it’s especially good for IP providers like Imagination and ARM, which aren't burdened by the heavy lifting of manufacturing and still end up with products in hundreds of millions (if not billions) of devices.

Mobile Products

In this mostly ARM-dominated market, Imagination now offers design IP for major SoC components, from MIPS CPUs to PowerVR GPUs and connectivity modules, in devices from the ultra-low-end up to the flagship level.

At the bottom of the spectrum, Imagination offers the I-class MIPS CPU cores to compete against ARM's Cortex-A7. At the high-end, it has the P-class MIPS cores, comparable to ARM’s Cortex-A15. For the mid-range, customers can choose between the I- and P-class cores, depending on their application.

Although the company acquired MIPS just one and a half years ago, Imagination has been in the GPU business for a lot longer. Naturally, it has a wider variety of options at all levels, from the low-end half-cluster G6050 (for ultra-low-end devices) to the flagship-worthy GX6650 (a mobile Kepler competitor) and the ray tracing hybrid GPU, the GR6500. Notice that last year’s high-end GPU, the G6430 found in Apple’s iPad Air, is now offered at the mid-range.

Imagination offers a variety of video accelerators, too. But in terms of ISPs and connectivity modules, there seems to be only one option for each across all market segments.

Mobile Competitors

It’s no secret that the mobile market is dominated by ARM-based CPUs, with Imagination only getting into the host processing space recently by acquiring MIPS Technologies, and Intel not having managed to establish a strong foothold yet either.

In the mobile graphics market, things are a little different; Imagination is the established leader there. However, ARM has been seeing more success with its Mali GPU IP thanks to Samsung, but also other smaller licensees in China. While not a direct IP competitor, Qualcomm’s integrated graphics technology is also taking from Imagination’s market share recently. In 2013, Imagination’s slice of the mobile GPU pie shrank from 52% to 37%.

As we can see from the table, Nvidia lost most of its market share in the mobile graphics market last year. But with the switch to its Kepler architecture, and soon Maxwell, the company could recover some of that. As we've already seen from Tegra K1, its newest design is a lot more competitive than the previous-gen SoCs.

Nvidia also has an advantage with the OpenGL 4.4 API support, which will take time for the competition to implement. Before that happens, there's a good chance we'll see games ported down to the mobile space from the desktop, which would run on Nvidia's Tegra processors. For now, though, that competitive advantage is mainly hypothetical. Without the design wins and showcase titles, there's not much else to report on. At least other companies are pushed to innovate faster.

In this GFXBench 3.0-derived benchmark that loops 30 times, charted out by the folks at Imagination, it’s easy to see which GPU maintains its performance over time and which ones throttle after a period of time. If we're to believe this information, the PowerVR Rogue GPU doesn't throttle, while the competition does. Of course, we know that there are unaccounted variables to consider. How big are the form factors being compared? What clock rates are being used? What device vendors do with the SoCs they pick has a ton of influence on how well they run in the wild.

Then again, we've noticed similar trends in our own lab. Apple's devices running iOS tend to start and finish strong in GFXBench, while a lot of the Android-based competitors without PowerVR graphics are far less consistent. Just look at the issues we ran into inSamsung Galaxy S4 Slows Down Under Heavy Load in 4.4

For now, Imagination remains a mobile graphics leader with healthy market share and strong GPU IP. The competition is getting fiercer every year though, so we'll see how the space plays out.

3. Wearables, Home Entertainment, And Automotive

Three of the hottest potentially high-growth markets being tested by almost everyone in the tech industry right now are wearables, home entertainment, and automotive.

Wearables

The smartphone and tablet spaces are already so saturated. As a result, a long list of companies is looking for the next big billion dollar industry to enter. Imagination, like Qualcomm, Nvidia, Intel, and others, is also interested in capturing a large portion of these new “smart” product markets, to establish itself as a leader ahead of other capable technology providers.

MIPS, which is now owned by Imagination, is part of the alliance for Android Wear that Google set up. There has been a lot of talk about smart watches over the past two years, but nobody seems to have gotten it right. Android Wear, as a platform for smart watches, is trying to make sense of it all thanks to voice control and Google Now notifications.

If Android Wear turns out to be as popular for smart watches as Android was for smartphones, then all of these initial players are likely to win big, from chip designers to manufacturers.

Imagination once again promises to offer almost everything a manufacturer could want from a smart watch SoC, from a single microcontroller for fitness tracking to high-end processors with many of the same components you’d see in a smartphone, which is not surprising considering these smart watches will have their own operating systems and even apps.

One example of such a design is Ingenic’s Newton modular platform. It includes a low-power 1 GHz MIPS CPU, 2D graphics hardware, support for up to 3 GB of RAM, 802.11a/b/g/n in the 2.4 GHz band, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, FM, sensors, and even USB ports.

Home Entertainment

Another market expected to explode in the next few years is smart TVs, along with micro-consoles and set top boxes. All three product types exist within the same category, since they're more or less serving the same folks (think about the Xbox customer who wants to both play games and watch movies on his TV). The only difference is how much performance is needed from each device.

If you're looking at a smart TV, for example, the focus won't be on gaming, but rather delivering enough speed for a satisfying user interface and HD (or 4K) video playback. Those more interesting in gaming will encounter an SoC with faster host processing and graphics, naturally. Customers looking to build a higher-end console can even opt for Imagination’s hybrid ray tracing logic that promises higher graphics quality for a lower cost than more powerful GPUs.

Automotive

The automotive market is not necessarily new, but it’s only now showing signs of explosive growth for companies like Imagination and ARM, since cars are now poised to become “smart” too, just like almost everything else.

On one hand, this is happening because more new vehicles are adopting tablet-like digital dashboards. On the other, we're about to enter a world where cars have to drive themselves, and communicate with other cars and infrastructure around them. As such, they need to become more advanced in terms of computing power, enabling all sorts of complex tasks.

Imagination doesn’t seem to have a highly customizable offering portfolio yet, most likely because the space is very sensitive to one-off designs, and instead prefers a one-size-fits-all approach. The chips themselves are a miniscule part of a car’s total cost, so it doesn’t make much of a difference if the SoC costs $10 more. It is a market, however, that prefers performance and reliability, and that’s really where Imagination has to deliver.

Imagination’s biggest competitors seem to be Nvidia (which is actually the only chip maker that’s part of Google’s Open Automotive Alliance), Qualcomm, and Intel. It’s still very early, so a lot can change over the next few years.

4. Imagination Versus ARM Versus Intel

Up until a few years ago, most of us only cared about the x86 chip market and its competitors: AMD and Intel. More recently, though, the battle erupted between Intel and the whole ecosystem of ARM partners.

Intel is trying its best to muscle into the huge (and growing) mobile space dominated by ARM and its licensees, while ARM, through its partners, appears determined to make headway in the more profitable PC and server markets dominated by Intel. While their strengths don't overlap yet, the very fact both companies are trying to encroach upon each others' turf keeps them on their toes. This helps us as consumers to benefit from efficient and high-performance processors that don't break the bank.

More competition almost always proves to benefit the end-user. And with the MIPS CPU architecture now owned by Imagination, the company becomes a veteran in the embedded chip market seemingly able to compete toe-to-toe with ARM (especially) and Intel.

So far, MIPS is a more obscure platform in the consumer market, and it has never really tried that hard to get into consumer devices either. While apparently more efficient, MIPS CPUs are usually built on process nodes a generation behind what ARM's partners are using, negating many of their advantages over ARM-based processors. Since MIPS chips haven’t been in high demand (or even well-supported in popular operating systems), OEMs also had few reasons to choose MIPS over ARM.

Now, the architecture is in more competent hands, which will hopefully put it on the latest process node and allow the inherent strengths of the MIPS architecture to shine.

In the comparison with competing high-end ARM CPUs above (which is again provided by Imagination, so do with the information what you will), we see its MIPS P5600 “Warrior” CPU manage to beat the ARM competition (likely Cortex-A15) in performance/MHz, performance/mW, and also performance/area. Keeping in mind that the other factors were most likely normalized in these comparisons, it’s still impressive that MIPS-based CPUs can be this competitive with ARM in the mobile market already.

Having a good product isn’t everything, though. And if Intel has its work cut out for it, Imagination isn't going to have any easier of a time with MIPS, a much less known brand. But with a proper “hero” CPU core that can be used in a few popular mobile devices, Imagination could get the awareness it needs to gain customers and significant market share in the mobile CPU space.

Of course, ARM isn’t Imagination’s only competitor. While Intel is currently more of an investor (it owns around 5% of the company) and customer of Imagination, having used its PowerVR technology in a number of Atom processors, it’s also poised to become an opposing faction. As both Intel and Imagination fight ARM for dominance of the mobile CPU market, they will inevitably become competitors themselves, which means we could soon have three prominent architectures powering our devices.

In the past this would’ve been a lot harder, because operating systems went with one architecture and then stuck with that for decades. But thanks to Android’s Dalvik VM, it’s now possible to have real competition, not just between a couple of companies like what we see in the PC space, but rather multiple designs suited to different purposes.