Imagination Technologies has signed a new licence with Samsung related to a new core from Imagination’s PowerVR SGX graphics accelerator family as it looks toward the growing 1080p HD market.

The graphics chips will be used in system-on-chip devices for the mobile, consumer and navigation markets.

Imagination Technologies first introduced three PowerVR SGX programmable graphics processing IP cores last year.

According to the UK-based chip IP developer, the feature set of the 3D graphics IP exceeds Khronos’ OpenGL 2.0 shader and Microsoft Vertex and Pixel Shader Model 3 requirements, also supports a full range of key video codecs and OpenVG 2D vector graphics acceleration.

The firm has used a parallel, multi-threaded architecture in the programmable device, which enables SGX to perform not only 2D and 3D acceleration but also acceleration of a range of video standards. PowerVR SGX family video/image decode and encode processing support includes H.264, MPEG-4/2, VC-1 (WMV9), JPEG and others.

Under the terms of its licensing arrangements, Imagination receives licence fees and royalty revenues on SoCs incorporating Imagination’s IP.

This new Samsung agreement is further to the license agreement announced in April.

Also this week, Imagination Technologies has introduced a PowerVR SGX core which includes native support for 128-bit or other higher data throughput bus fabrics.

The SGX531 core has an upgraded 128-bit internal bus architecture which means it can be used for 1080p HD resolution displays and high frame rate applications.