Imagination Technologies, makers of the POWERVR GPUs that power iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, has announced that 6 new partners, including 3 unnamed — and presumably including Apple — have licensed their upcoming next generation POWERVR Series 6.

The POWERVR Series6 GPU family, which delivers unrivalled GFLOPS per mm2 and per mW for all APIs, delivers not only a clear technology advantage and exceptional roadmap, driven by one of the largest teams of graphics engineers in the world, but also an extensive ecosystem of third party developers which has created hundreds of thousands of apps optimised for POWERVR enabled devices to date.

The current iPad 2, and likely the iPhone 5 this fall, make use of the POWERVR SGX543MP2 as part of the Apple A5 system-on-a-chip. Apple claimed the A5 had 9x the graphic performance of the previous year’s A4, and lets the iPad do all sorts of wonderful things, like AirPlay mirroring for games the level of Real Racing HD. What an Apple A6 chipset could do with an even more powerful the Series 6 — other than melting a hole in your pocket — could start rivaling the experience, if not raw polygon count, of console games. It could also more than make up for an iPad with a Retina Display…

Now we just have to wait and see if they can be produced in volume in time for Apple’s 2012 release schedule.

[Imagination via MacRumors]

Imagination, which counts Apple as one of its owners, has provided the GPU (graphics processing unit) for every iPhone to date, including the current iPhone 3GS PowerVR SGX, so it’s not unreasonable to assume the latest, greatest PowerVR SGX545 introduced at CES will be in the 4th generation iPhone, likely to be announced in June/July (and the iPod touch to follow):

SGX545 will also deliver OpenGL ES 2.x and OpenGL 3.2 to deliver class leading 3D graphics performance, and will also support OpenCL 1.0 full profile capability which will enable mobile and embedded applications to take maximum advantage of the capabilities offered by these GPU APIs for both 3D graphics and general purpose applications.

Could we see this spun into a new, ARM Cortex A9 multi-core cpu by Apple’s own PA Semi? We’ve already got great 3D gaming, what’s this one designed to do, burn our eyeballs into the back of our Avatar-scorched skulls?

[Imagination via 9to5mac]

Imagination makes the PowerVR graphics core chip (GPU) that powers the current generations of iPhone and iPod touch handsets. Apple likes them enough to have become a huge licensor and even investor in the company. Well, it’s looking like that investment may pay off for iPhone users in the next generation iPhone and iPod touch (which TiPb is still predicting will hit in July and September respectively).

Even bigger news? It looks like these new multi-core chips will be transparent from the developer’s point of view. That means Apple has far less risk in “fracturing the platform” by adding more GPU firepower to the next gen iPhone. Also, they look to be supporting OpenCL, Apple’s open source implementation that allows GPUs to be treated like CPUs and boost general purpose computing when they’re not throwing polygons and pixels around our favorite games or movies.

Says the Register (via MacRumors):

Without any intervention by the application – and, more importantly, without any intervention by the application’s developer – the driver will pass data to an “MP code scheduler,” which will in turn pass that data to one pipeline scheduler per core, which will then pass it to one thread scheduler per multi-threaded processing engine, which will then manage the threads through the engines as they process the graphics data.

In other words, the SGX543 can have any number of cores from two to sixteen with no change in the driver software or the application. All that complex data/pipeline/thread management is done in hardware. No muss, no fuss.

But a whole lot of “we want it now!”…

Apple Insider‘s Prince McLean, whose pieces often seem.. ahem… Roughly Drafted… brings us an in depth look for what we might see in the next generation, 3G iPhone, and in a word, it’s hardcore.

McLean begins with a profile of Imagination’s Open GL ES 1.1, PowerVR MBX that powers the current iPhone (and many other mobile devices), and then gets into the next generation, 2.0, PowerVR SGX — which brings the shaders, and the VDX core with its mobile HD video codec.

Putting the pieces together, including an unprecedented Samsung announcement that it will be manufacturing these technologies, Imagination’s mysterious unnamed licensee, and the flexibility the newly acquired PA Semi gives them, design-wise, McLean (through some assumptive leaps, to be sure), paints a glowing picture of Apple’s future gaming and video potential:

By gaining access to exclusive new generations of mobile graphics technology, Apple can differentiate its products from other smartphones and mobile Internet devices with an edge in performance while offering full support for industry standard OpenGL ES graphics. [...]

Whether this theory is ultimately proven true or not, I think the SDK event — and its clear focus on games — showed that Apple finally might just be taking the space seriously. What do you think?