PowerVR Chips Are Hot. Intel Buys More Imagination

• A day after Apple snapped up 3.6 percent of Imagination Technologies, the company that developed the technology used in the 3G iPhone’s graphics chips, Intel increased its own stake in the company.
• London-based Imagination Technologies develops Meta processor cores and PowerVR graphics engines found on computer/smart phone chips. Companies including Apple, Samsung and Intel have all licensed out Imagination’s technologies in the past year to enhance their product line.
• Why is everyone so hot on the company? Imagination’s PowerVR Technology determines up-front what is visible or not when rendering pixels on a screen. This ingenious approach makes great savings in memory bandwidth and thus enables modern games to run at optimal performance in memory and power limited environments. The result: awesome 3D graphics in devices that require little memory and power. With netbooks and smart phones coming to market stronger than ever, both contain little memory and have low power, yet graphics cannot be sacrificed.
• Apple now owns 8.2 million shares, equal to a 3.6 percent stake in the company. The following day, Intel acquired 934,422 shares in Imagination rasing its total stake to 3.04 percent. The news bumped Imagination’s stock up 21% to $69.25 per share. Moreover, Intel also said that if anyone else trys to come in and gain a large stake in Imagination, that they will purchase the whole company. They wouldn’t want to do that right now, because Imagination licenses out to some of Intel’s competitors and it could potentially hurt the company’s long term future.

Tagged as: graphics cards, Imagination, Intel, Intel Invests, PowerVR chips, Technologies