Imagination offers ray tracing IP ahead of Apple’s 5G iPhone launch

Graphics chip designer Imagination Technologies may have been shut out of providing GPUs for Apple’s iPhones and iPads, forcing the company to sell itself off, but its graphics IPs — notably including ray tracing technologies — remain valuable. That’s why Imagination has decided to license its ray tracing IP to other companies, EE Times reports, enabling chipmakers such as Apple to bring the cutting-edge rendering feature to mobile devices for the first time.

According to the report, Imagination’s scalable ray tracing system is capable of enabling the light ray-based rendering feature within a range of power and thermal constraints, including system-on-chip designs. This is a significant achievement, given that ray tracing GPUs for PCs generally demand fan cooling and serious power supplies, though they tend to operate at higher-screen resolutions. Imagination says its IP was developed specifically for power efficiency and delivers billion-of-rays-per-second rendering, matching “much larger and less power-efficient solutions.”