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!”…

The iPhone can play 3D games and pump out high quality video like almost no other handset on the market, but when you’re not gaming or watching video, when you’re just using apps or doing old-school computing, all that power goes to waste, right?

Well, maybe not for much longer.

PowerVR from Imagination is the graphics and video processor core inside the iPhone (and other mobile devices), and we mentioned earlier in the week that it’s now confirmed Apple is a mega-licensee of the technology moving forward.

Now Apple Insider reports that Imagination is looking for OpenCL engineers.

While OpenGL is the open source competitor to Microsoft’s proprietary DirectX graphics technology (the stuff that drives all those 3D games), OpenCL (Wikipedia link) has recently been open sourced by Apple for leveraging that power for mainstream computing tasks. And Imagination integrating OpenCL means Apple’s desktop OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard might not be their only OS to benefit…

Hello GPU accelerated general iPhone processing! Hopefully this means regular old applications, from data bases to web code processing will soon be snappier, and more powerful.

Um… now please?