Your iPhone could be displaying high-definition and three-dimensional graphics by as soon as 2010, according to a company partly owned by the maker of the popular touchscreen handset.
Imagination Technologies used CES to introduce its PowerVR SGX543 chipset, said to produce 33 megapixel frames at 30 frames per second. The speed could “produce reasonable 3D at HD resolutions,” according to one report.
The chip is also compatible with the Apple-backed OpenCL standard, expected to be used in the upcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
Apple, which is an Imagination Technologies investor, currently uses the slower MBX chip from Imagination in its iPhone. The MBX reportedly hasn’t been updated since 2007.
Although Imagination provided no details on when the new PowerVR chip will be produced, more details are expected in March.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
