Nexus said:
Your achievement with/the design of MBX is marvelous, but I would say the two chips don't play in the same league. Or do you see MBX being used in cellular phones next year?
MBX comes in many shapes and forms, pubicly known as : MBX Pro, MBX and finally MBX Lite. They are off-the-shelf 3D, 2D and video acceleration cores: MBX Pro for very high-performance high-end 2D/3D graphics enabled set-top boxes and home entertainment systems; MBX with best area/performance for power-critical handheld devices and mainstream set-top boxes; and MBX Lite for the most power-critical cost-sensitive entry-level mobile applications.
One thing to keep track of is that the capabilities of the processors themselves is increasing to such a level that "extremely" low-end graphics acceleration might have very little to add (borders on graphics deceleration).
I can't give out specifications for MBX Lite, don't think they are on the public website, and we don't have real specs for the BitBoys Part.
Given the presentation it sounds like the bitboys chipset is actually an accelerated vector graphics core, meaning it can draw edge antialiased (flat?) polygons. During the presentation it was mentioned that ZBuffers were too expensive, and advised developers to sort the polygons themselves (expensive ?) and later this was again mentioned saying that sorting was also important for AA methods which are sort dependent. This sounds like edge antialiased polygon drawing using some kind of cheap edge coverage technique which is sort dependent (think of a simplified version of Matrox FAA). Any other views on this ? I am also wondering how a potentially completely ZBuffer-less solution will fit in with OpenGL-ES (check Siggraph presentation for details on that).
Dee said:
Have there been (or are there any upcoming) announcements of products using the MBX core - obviously excepting the ARM deal?
There are press releases indicating deals with Hitachi, Intel and ARM. These are chip level deals, custommers of these chips are usually not announced because these companies often don't want to reveal what technology their products are based on (Just as an example: It is a "Nokia" phone, not an ARM+MBX+X+Y Phone) and its quite early to announce that kind of products.
If you want product announcements check this :
http://www.imgtec.com/News/PressReleases/SammyToUsePowerVRBasedSystemOnChip.asp
Note all just my views and guesses, not company view or anything.