iPad 3 to Outshine Xbox 720 and PS4 With Superior Graphics?

By Vincent Funaro, Christian Post Reporter Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Apple is expected to launch the iPad 3 in March of this year and companies making parts for the device have spoken up about its potential including Imagination Technologies who boasted of its mobile graphics chip that is likely to make its way to the tablet.

The company’s chip, code named Rogue, delivers 20 times the performance of current generation hardware with five times greater efficiency, according to a press release by the company.

In the release the company elaborated on what would be its first two PowerVR Series6 designs, the G6400 and G6200.

Both of these components will have two and four compute clusters, with computing performance “exceeding 100 gigaFLOPS” and reaching the “teraFLOPS range.” These Series6 chips are supported and widely used by Apple’s iOS mobile operating system meaning that these updated versions are likely to be included in the next-gen iPad and iPhone.

Eight chip makers have signed up for the new designs from Imagination, including ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Renesas Electronics. Apple could be among those two unnamed licensees.

ST0-Ericsson recently commented on Imagination’s technology stating that its Nova A9600 system-on-a-chip based on the Rogue architecture is capable of pumping out over 350 million real polygons per second. This creates impressive graphics that could rival the technology included in gaming consoles such as Xbox 360 and PS3.

It seems that Apple will continue to license Imagination for its products since it uses the company for the current lines of iPads and iPhones. The A5 chip inside the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 uses Imagination’s PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU cores. The A4 chip used in the iPad and iPhone 4 has an older generation single-core PowerVR SGX 535 graphics processor. The third generation iPod Touch includes this technology as well.