PowerVR hints at PC IGPs with SGX545/555 [CES 2007]
Tuesday 09th January 2007, 12:12:00 PM, written by Arun
Imagination Technologies' PowerVR division has just issued two press releases (1 & 2),
announcing new members of the SGX family and the display of working
silicon at CES 2007, respectively. If this doesn't make your heart beat
fast enough already, it might also be worth mentioning that two of the
SGX variants announced are aimed primarily at the PC market: the SGX545
and SGX555. The former is said to be "available" (for licensing by
third parties?) in H2 2007, while the latter is simply said to be "on
the roadmap". These two product variants most likely correspond to the
parts formely codenamed "Muse" and "Athena".
It seems to us that this kind of product would be aimed at Intel IGPs in the early 2008 (or late 2007?) timeframe, and more specifically at the ultraportable/sub-notebook market. HKEPC had an interesting piece related to Intel's products in that segment, specifically the Core 2 Solo ULV. This single-core Conroe-L running at up to 1.2GHz has an impressively low TDP of 5W. The catch, though, is that the chipsets and IGPs alone (945GM) add 7W, while an higher-end 965GM would add 14W. Ouch. It is fairly clear, thus, that highly power-focused technology such as the SGX has a clear market value in that segment, especially so with Vista stressing power consumption more than ever before for IGPs and GPUs in general.
This market hardly is NVIDIA or AMD's bread and butter right now though, so they don't have much to be afraid of. This could prove to be a bigger threat for VIA, on the other hand, if their upcoming CPU/chipset platform revisions are not as competitive in terms of power efficiency when running Windows Vista. Longer term, a logical evolution of this could make for a worthy competitor to AMD's Fusion, at least in that specific market, but it remains to be seen how both AMD and Intel position these offerings.
It seems to us that this kind of product would be aimed at Intel IGPs in the early 2008 (or late 2007?) timeframe, and more specifically at the ultraportable/sub-notebook market. HKEPC had an interesting piece related to Intel's products in that segment, specifically the Core 2 Solo ULV. This single-core Conroe-L running at up to 1.2GHz has an impressively low TDP of 5W. The catch, though, is that the chipsets and IGPs alone (945GM) add 7W, while an higher-end 965GM would add 14W. Ouch. It is fairly clear, thus, that highly power-focused technology such as the SGX has a clear market value in that segment, especially so with Vista stressing power consumption more than ever before for IGPs and GPUs in general.
This market hardly is NVIDIA or AMD's bread and butter right now though, so they don't have much to be afraid of. This could prove to be a bigger threat for VIA, on the other hand, if their upcoming CPU/chipset platform revisions are not as competitive in terms of power efficiency when running Windows Vista. Longer term, a logical evolution of this could make for a worthy competitor to AMD's Fusion, at least in that specific market, but it remains to be seen how both AMD and Intel position these offerings.
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