On to different matters, can you tell us anything more about the status of PowerVR Series 5?

Nothing really beyond what we've said already. We've been fairly open about the fact that we have an ongoing high-end graphics development, but we've made no product announcements.

What are the expectations for any further announcements?

We actually plan to announce close to availability.

Most of your developer relations group were contributing articles related to DirectX9's currently unused Pixel and Vertex Shader 3.0 models. Given that you are spending time discussing it, would it be reasonable to assume there would be some comeback on it?

What would you expect us to be doing if we were doing high end graphics, other than looking at the future of graphics? You can read into it what you like, but obviously we and our developer relations have to understand the future of 3D graphics in order to inform any development we have underway.

Would you say it's likely that PS/VS 3.0 would be part of the development of Series 5?

It's obviously something we've been looking at so that we can make decisions on product specifics.

Given the timing now it would seem like Series 5 won't be here before very late '03 or '04, which means you'll likely be going head-to-head with ATI's and NVIDIA's next generation chipsets. Do you expect to be comparable to those?

What we've said is that we are doing high end graphics research and development which is obviously so that we can take advantage of opportunities in arcade, console and PC type markets. If you take PC specifically what you'd have to do is come out with competitive parts - there are different types of competitiveness in that market dependant on which segment you are aiming for, but in terms of targets for performance / feature-set that's something we want to keep under wraps.

Well, previously the ethos has been of mid-range and reasonable volume...

That would have been the ethos of PowerVR and its partners. What I'm saying there is that we had a partner in ST and, between us, we came up with a specific approach to market, but I wouldn't treat that as a given. What we're here to do is provide technology to partners to make them successful, and it depends on what that partner wants and what their view on how they want to enter the market is and that will influence us on how we implement a technology.

At present it appears that you haven't got any specific licensees for Series 5, which tends to suggest that at present you'll be doing everything from the design of the IP all the way to the silicon level in-house - is that the case?

The majority of Series 5 development has been done in-house, however we are not expecting to become a fables semiconductor company in respect to any of our products.

• If you wish to comment on this article please do so here.