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Another related British company which has become very successful without anyone noticing is Imagination Technologies (formerly Videologic). They had a successf
by leonroy 11y ago
Another related British company which has become very successful without anyone noticing is Imagination Technologies (formerly Videologic).
They had a successful graphics card business during the 90s but with the introduction of 3D graphics accelerators their product (PowerVR) whilst semi-successful began to struggle against 3dfx and nVidia's TNT and Geforce range of graphics cards.
Eventually they pulled out of the standalone graphics market and pottered around producing speakers and radios. They had a few sucesses like winning the Sega Dreamcast bid from 3dfx but I believe it wasn't until the need to have powerful and low power graphics chips in phones that the PowerVR's very efficient rendering technology pushed Imagination back into the fore. Their graphics chips nowadays can be found powering most smartphones and tablets.
Very interesting company and a very interesting past.
- dogma1138 11y agoI wouldn't call Imagination Technologies a successful company their IP is being shipped in billion of SOC's but they yearly revenue is below 200M and they operate at break even or a loss. IT seems to be a case study of a company which it's IP is a corner stone in many consumer devices but some how never managed to capitalize on it. ARM is a very good example of how to spin off your IP and make it successful even when your actual business (Acorn) is going bust.
- orf 11y ago> I wouldn't call Imagination Technologies a successful company their IP is being shipped in billion of SOC I would consider any company who's tech ships in a billion devices successful, regardless of if they have managed to capitalize on it.
- BHSPitMonkey 11y agoI think "company" was the operative word there. They are certainly successful technologists, but perhaps not a success as a company.
- leonroy 11y agoI had no idea they made so little money based upon their (apparently) very unique tile rendering graphics technology. Their CEO and sales guys clearly aren't doing as good a job as their engineering department!
- timthorn 11y agoWhat makes this more interesting is that Imagination now owns MIPS.
- digi_owl 11y agoPowerVR was a interesting product, much like the 3dfx comeptition, it was a "pass-through" design in that it only did the 3D part and you needed a video card alongside it to get anything else. The difference between PowerVR and 3dfx was that while the latter used a a short VGA cable that went from the video card to the 3dfx card, and then you plugged the screen into the 3dfx, the PowerVR passed everything around on the PCI bus (very similar to what Nvidia Optimus is doing on laptops). But then Nvidia came to market with the TNT series that did everything on a single board, and they could do it in 32-bit while 3dfx was limited to 16-bit, and ATI got involved where before they had only done 2D stuff. BTW, 3dfx introduced SLI to the gaming world. This while still using the physical pass through VGA cable. Made for quite the cable salad.