Imagination making compilers

LONDON, UK: Imagination Technologies Group, the graphics core licensor, based in Kings Langley, England, says it is making compilers which can assign tasks across graphics as well as general-purpose processing units.

Though the company has been having its own 32-bit Meta processor core for most part of this decade, Imagination Technologies is known best as a licensor of graphics and video cores and application-specific digital audio broadcast.

The familiarity of the company with digital signal processing and parallelism, according to Hossein Yassaie, chief executive of Imagination Technologies, would be advantageous to it once the digital signal processing and parallelism techniques gain widespread relevance.

Yassie told a meeting of executives of the chip industry – organized by Silicon SouthWest in Bath, England – that OpenCL is an important development, while speaking of a standard being developed by the Khronos Group to handle parallel programming on multi-core CPUs and graphics processors. This standard was initially developed with the help of Apple Incorporated.

Imagination Technologies, according to Hossein Yassaie, is a part of a developing group of firms that include Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Advanced Micro Devices. The member-companies of the group are developing software techniques that would let GPUs run applications other than graphics rendering. For example, with the software techniques being developed, a GPU can be used to do visual recognition as well as advanced mathematics.