IMAGINATION TECHNOLOGIES REPORTS MOBILE AND EMBEDDED GRAPHICS MARKET DEVELOPING AT ACCELERATED PACE

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA, Nov. 6, 2007 -- Imagination Technologies - a leader in mobile multimedia technologies - today revealed further information about the development of the mobile graphics market and POWERVR SGX540, its high performance core for mobile and embedded graphics.

Designed to enable the emerging OpenGL ES 2.0 generation of 3D devices, as well as OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG, the recently ratified vector graphics standard, POWERVR SGX is the follow-on to Imagination's POWERVR MBX, the de facto standard for mobile 3D hardware acceleration.

During a tour of key customers and influencers across Asia, beginning today in Korea before moving to Taiwan and Japan, Imagination will be delivering the message that uptake of graphics acceleration is moving faster than expected in the mobile market and that the expected migration of user interface, visualization, games and navigation to 3D will be with most consumers soon.

"The success of 3D enabled handsets means that they now make up the highest profile segment of mobile phones and over 25 million OpenGL ES 1.1 3D devices have now shipped, the vast majority of which are POWERVR enabled," says Hossein Yassaie, CEO, Imagination Technologies. "There is no longer a question of whether graphics acceleration adds to the user experience. Mobile handset OEMs are now embracing both higher performance and wider deployment at a higher rate than even the most optimistic of industry insiders would have predicted a year ago."

Across Imagination's partners over 15 SoCs are committed utilizing POWERVR SGX.

The family of POWERVR IP cores address the feature set and performance requirements of all the key market segments. Already many partner SoC designs based on POWERVR SGX are at an advanced stage or sampling, with end-user products expected in 2008. These SoCs will deliver graphics performance several times that of current 3D enabled handsets. With the market demonstrating growing recognition of the importance of graphics for mobile devices, Imagination is seeing increased engagements with customers for the high performance cores that make up its POWERVR SGX family, including POWERVR SGX520, which Imagination believes is now setting the base-line for next generation of graphics enabled handsets, SGX530, SGX535 and the new SGX540.

POWERVR SGX520, SGX530 and SGX535 are already available.

Imagination has now announced the POWERVR SGX540 IP core and is beginning engagement with lead partners. SGX540 targets very high-performance mobile phones, in-car, DTV, and mobile computing devices. With double the pipelines of the already blisteringly-powerful SGX530, SGX540 can offer twice the architectural performance in the all important area of shader throughput in real SoC implementations. Similar to other family members, it has been designed to target a variety of process nodes including upcoming 45nm designs.

With significant architectural performance scalability across the POWERVR SGX520, SGX530, SGX535 and SGX540, and process node clock speed enhancements, Imagination's partners have significant flexibility enabling them to target all the key market segments with optimal designs.

POWERVR SGX brings the advanced graphical capability of shaders to mobile and embedded graphics. Shaders are advanced effects which enable more realistic and compelling images to be created. Unlike traditional 3D rendering, shaders are programmable, enabling the content developers' creativity to become the defining factor on the appearance of a game, user interface (UI) or other application.

Continues Yassaie: "We believe the market has fully embraced our roadmap. We already have a strong line-up of licensees for POWERVR SGX530 and SGX535 and are now seeing a growing demand for SGX520 and SGX540. The uptake of 3D in mobile devices is already accelerating quickly, with over 60 models using our current POWERVR MBX technology. The industry is learning from the success of the 'OpenGL ES 1.1 generation' of phones that it is important to get onboard quickly or risk missing key engagements."

The POWERVR SGX family provides a significant increase in capability over the previous generation of graphics processors, setting new benchmarks for performance while also delivering optimal size and power consumption figures.

In a highly integrated SoC, containing graphics, CPU, communications and other functions, the ability to minimize bandwidth and maximize latency tolerance is extremely valuable as there are many competing processing functions. POWERVR SGX's shaders are executed in parallel in the multi-threaded architecture which massively improves system latency tolerance as different shaders can be scheduled based on data availability.

Concludes Yassaie: "We know that the partnerships we have built around POWERVR SGX are they key ones in the industry for the next generation of mobile devices and look forward to it exceeding the huge success of POWERVR MBX, the leading product in the market today."

POWERVR SGX's patented tiled-based deferred rendering and multi-threaded Universal Scalable Shading Engine (USSETM) keep graphics processing on chip and are critical in ensuring that the POWERVR SGX GPU architecture can deliver optimal performance from any given silicon area or memory subsystem while minimizing power consumption by avoiding unnecessary processing.

Backward compatibility with Imagination's POWERVR MBX, the leading mobile 3D graphics technology, is a major advantage of POWERVR SGX, given the existing products, customer base and the growing ecosystem around POWERVR technology.

POWERVR SGX is fully supported with the POWERVR Insider ecosystem, the market leading technical support and co-marketing program. See: www.powervrinsider.com.

Imagination Technologies has one of the largest and most experienced teams in embedded and mobile graphics in the world, with over 200 people focused on the development of the IP and the support of the ecosystem.

About Imagination Technologies

Imagination Technologies Group plc (FTSE:IMG) - a leader in semiconductor System on Chip Intellectual Property (SoC IP) - creates and licenses market-leading embedded graphics, video and display accelerators, multi-threaded processors and multi-standard receiver technologies. These IP solutions are complemented by dynamic and extensive developer and middleware ecosystems. Target markets include digital radio and audio; mobile phone multimedia; car navigation & driver information; personal navigation; UMPC and Mobile Internet Device (MID); digital TV & set top box; and mobile TV. Its licensees include leading semiconductor and consumer electronics companies. Imagination has corporate headquarters in the United Kingdom, with sales and R&D offices worldwide. See: www.imgtec.com.

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