Apple went from owning 3. 5%(this is the maker of the PowerVR graphics architecture found in the iPhone) thanksto a recent round of share acquisition (2. 2M shares).

6% of Imagination Technologies to owning 9. Interestingly, Intel also owns about 16% of Imagination, as there are plans to license graphics technologies for integration into Netbooks and MIDs.

Imagination then retreated into the mobile space where its PowerVRhad an inherent advantage and got quite a few contracts, but the iPhone deal is the onehas changed the game for the company. The PowerVR story is a roller-coaster ride: it got some glory for being in the SEGA Dreamcast and started to make a name for itself in the PC space, but ultimately got crushed by Nvidia and ATI.

) than most. It’s called a “Tiled Architecture” because it treats the display in small chunks, called tiles.

Why is PowerVR so great all the sudden? It uses an architecture that tends to consumesless resources ( power, transistors, cache memory. . . The Zune HD, on the other hand uses a traditional GPU architecture, and it will be interesting to see if PowerVR will continue to do as well in the future as competitors focus on making low-power designs.