Word on the street is that Imagination Technologies Group, licensee of graphics processor cores, has added Sony to its tally of international electronics systems company licensees.
Imagination announced November 24th that it has signed a license agreement with a new partner, a major international consumer electronics company, for a forthcoming member of Imagination's POWERVR SGX graphics processor family.
There were no names and no values ascribed to the licensing but the hint that it is materially insignificant. As a publicly held company Imagination is under pressure to disclose events of material significance via one or more of the many regulatory news services.
According to sources today's announcement by Imagination is for an upgrade to the Sony PSP2 and the SGX core is expected to be the SGX55x.
In its press release Imagination said that it expects that this agreement will extend the reach of its PowerVR architecture into "another high-volume consumer device segment."
Imagination said in September that it had concluded a multi-year, multi-use license agreement with an international electronics systems company. Imagination did not name the company or indicate how much money the deal might be worth. We speculated that deal might be with Apple.
Imagination's PowerVR MBX is already designed into the Apple iPhone (see iPhone code trail points to MBX graphics core, published July 2007). This could indicate that Imagination has followed a line possibly taken by another IP licensor, ARM Holdings plc, and granted a broad IP license to allow Apple to design with its cores.
Source: EETimes