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Videologic loss shrinks 87 per cent

PowerVR 2 royalties drive turnaround -- PowerVR 250 begins sampling

Videologic has cut its loss by 87 per cent over the last six months. Reporting its first-half results, the company revealed it was only in the red to the tune of £378,000, down from £2.93 million in the same period last year. The news came as Videologic and partner NEC announced they were sampling the latest chip in the PowerVR 2 graphics accelerator line, the PowerVR 250. Indeed, Videologic laid its financial turnaround at the door of the PowerVR 2. Designed by Videologic and manufactured by NEC, the chip was selected by Sega for its 128-bit games console, Dreamcast, which launched last week and shipped 150,000 units on the first day of sale. Videologic receives royalty payments for every PowerVR 2 used, and if Sega's attempt to sell its Naomi games system, also based on PowerVR 2, to Namco prove successful, Videologic is likely to see its revenue growing significantly. Already, 85 per cent of the company's revenue comes from chip royalties; the rest comes from sales of the its line of multimedia products. In fact, Videologic MD Geoff Shingles predicted the company will soon move out of the red. "We expect to be profitable in the second half," he said. The company hopes that profitability will be increased by sales of the Power VR 520, the first chip in the family that integrates 2D and 3D graphics accleration. Aimed at the PC market, the chip is optimised for the Pentium II processor and AMD's 3D Now! Technology. The chip provides all that users have come to expect from advanced graphics processors, but as yet no performance benchmarks have been released to enable comparisons with rival products from 3Dfx, NVIDIAg and S3. ®

  • NEC Electronics has announced is to cut 400 jobs from its US operation. The figure represents 13 per cent of the company's workforce. The cut was made because of the world slump in chip markets, said NEC, and will be accompanied by a restructure focusing the vendors efforts on system-on-a-chip design work.

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