KYRO 3 will be the first chip in the PowerVR Series4 family. It has not been announced yet, but we will consider it's possible specifications.

Specifications
 

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KYRO 3 The block diagram on the left represents the PowerVR Series4 chipset, that VideoLogic has mentioned in the past. Notice it has four rendering pipelines, and a transformation and lighting (T&L) unit. That diagram was released quite awhile back, so the PowerVR Series4 chipset that will be released may have differences. GPU core clocked at 250 MHz? DDR SDRAM clocked at 250 MHz? 128-bit memory data path? 8 GB/s memory bandwidth? 1000 megatexels per second  (1000 megapixels/sec)? Vertex Shader Processor Pixel Shader Processor Those shaders listed are important if the KYRO architecture is to be Direct X 8 compliant, as without those features, it can only claim to be Direct X 8 compatible. On the diagram it shows a block that says BIST, and that stands for Build In Self Test, which allows some self diagnostic after manufacturing to see if the chip is functional. This helps reduce testing costs.

Updates March 18th, 2002 Beyond3D.com interviewed David Harold, PR Manager of PowerVR Technologies, who had this to say: Q: Speaking of upcoming products, how far in development is Series 4? A: Well in fact series 4 is done, ready to be produced! However, you know the situation around ST. We need to wait until ST makes a deal, or not. When they can make a deal, we can start producing Series 4. If they cannot sell their graphics department, we have another issue. And maybe we are going to work with others. But this is all speculation, as I don't know how far ST is in their deals. You just have to wait and see what is going to happen. Editor's note - we all know there are rumors of Via buying ST's graphics division. How far the deal is, nobody knows. Q: What kind of performance can we expect of Series 4? High end or Midrange? A: The performance is actually in the high end section. However, the longer the situation around ST keeps going on, we have to wait until the new part can be shipped. So if we would ship the product now, the card is really a high end part, but if we have to wait another 3 months we are back in the mid-end. June 22nd, 2001 From a message board post at Ace's Hardware comes great news that the KYRO 3 will have hardware support for DirectX 8 pixel and vertex shaders! David Harold, PR-manager of Imagination Technologies, told the german game magazine PC Action that the kyro3 GPU besides a T&L-Pipeline and 4 rendering pipelines will also have support for programmable directx8 pixel- and vertex-shader. Support for DDR-RAM was also confirmed. The magazine also writes that the official announcement of the kyro3 will not be before november.  The game mags homepage: www.pcaction.de, the info is in its  july-issue.  Information is from: www.3dconcept.ch/cgi-bin/show.cgi?show=2468 where you will also find a chart with (now official) kyro family specs. Above post was mentioned in this Ace's Hardware news article. June 9th, 2001 More interesting news on KYRO 3, courtesy of ExtremeTech: Imagination and ST plan a more important product by the end of 2001, the STG5500. Fu described the new core as a complete redesign, designed to provide three times the performance of the 4000 series. The STG5500 will feature four pixel-processing pipelines, as well as a hardware-based transformation and lighting engine. While the hardware T&L will nominally place the Kyro on par with the latest Radeon and GeForce chips, Fu did not say if the engine will be programmable, a benefit Nvidia touts. The STG5500 may be branded as "Kyro 3," Fu said. The chip will shift to a 0.13-micron manufacturing process, while the core speed will be increased to about 250 MHz, he said. Because the Kyro's tiling architecture reduces the required memory bandwidth, the STG 4xxx-series parts have used cheaper single-data-rate memory, Fu said. But the STG5500's new core will require the increased bandwidth of DDR memory. The chip will support up to 64 Mbytes of frame buffer DRAM, consistent with earlier versions.

Links

VideoLogic's site
Imagination Technologies site
PowerVR.com website