Imagination Formally Announces It's Selling Itself

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Except for Imagination's patents, that is. I don't know what patents they have, but there must be something in there that Apple could use (either now or in the future).

Use your head and research Apple's patents for GPGPUs. You might learn a thing or two.

[uid313]

US$5 says Apple buys them out, or at least tries. And then doesn't lower the price of their iPhones using it.

Why on earth would Apple lower the price of their iPhone?

That makes absolutely no sense at all.

[coder]

acutally this is nice thought, intel gpu will get performance boost it needs

No, the two things holding it back are memory bandwidth (will be fixed when they start using HMC) and die area.

Intel has made CPUs with 2x and 3x sized GPU blocks (and some even with on-die DRAM) for a few generations, but they only sell them into the laptop market. They're not cheap, largely because large dies cost $$$.

[coder]

Use your head and research Apple's patents for GPGPUs. You might learn a thing or two.

I think @Vistaus wasn't saying they don't have patents, but that it would save Apple the trouble of having to license GPU patents (for graphics). Imagination has publicly made implied threats that Apple's own GPU would require a significant expenditure on patents from somebody. Use your search engine.

Edit: in case you have some trouble with that, here:

https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/247037-imagination-technologies-share-price-collapses-apple-dumps-company

[starshipeleven]

Guys, do you thing that is plausible a open source company to buy a hardware company?

One of the ways to profit off opensource is selling hardware running with it, so it's plausible.

In this specific case though it is not really plausible as Imagination is making only GPUs, so this fictional opensource company can only be a opensource-friendly hardware manufacturer that has SoCs or CPUs already.

[starshipeleven]

Use your head and research Apple's patents for GPGPUs. You might learn a thing or two.

And that has any bearing about embedded GPUs again?

[ksec]

This definitely crossed my mind, even before this announcement.

IMG is based in UK, not US. So under the UK system you have to announce these big changes which would dramatically affect the stock price instead of keep it till last min. It is basically responsible disclosure and is fairer to shareholders.

I am pretty sure there will be legal trouble* if Apple did this to drive down the stock price and then purchase it at a discount. The only way Apple could still buy them is to offer it at the same price as Apple initially talked to IMG before the break out.

* It is a little more complicated for Apple because they also happen to be one of the largest shareholder for IMG with 9% of its shares.

Although a lot of this is unlikely because rumours has Apple only wanted the GPU part and nothing else. And we know IMG is pretty much worthless without its GPU. MIPS is gim, their wireless IP isn't anything compared to CEVA.

[mulenmar]

Why on earth would Apple lower the price of their iPhone?

That makes absolutely no sense at all.

"Why would they?" -- they probably wouldn't, which is what I said. They *could*, and some of the people who buy Apple's overpriced products without thinking critically might expect Apple to drop the price a little to reflect it and compete better with Android phones, but they won't. Never said sheeple were good at business sense.

"Why could they?" -- the same way Commodore did back in the day, by owning the entirety of the supply chain and thus being able to control the cost of the chips. Difference here being that Apple wouldn't own the factory, but similarity being that they don't have to pay to license the IP. They already design their own CPUs for their iWalledGarden tech; if they bought out the PowerVR GPU tech's owner, Apple's profit margin would increase.

This is all hypothetical, of course, but it makes some sense and has plenty of corollaries in history. AMD bought ATI, nVidia bought 3dfx, etc. I don't know that they dropped the prices then, either.

[carewolf]

"OMG WHAT, WHY DID I NOT SEE THIS COMING" - no one at all

Imagination holds the patent on tile-based rendering which forms the basis of the Metal API. Apple made the mistake of making a low-level graphics API that gives direct access to Imagination GPUs and which uses their patents.

[Vistaus]

I think @Vistaus wasn't saying they don't have patents, but that it would save Apple the trouble of having to license GPU patents (for graphics). Imagination has publicly made implied threats that Apple's own GPU would require a significant expenditure on patents from somebody. Use your search engine.

Edit: in case you have some trouble with that, here:

https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/2...-dumps-company

Yes, thank you, that's exactly what I was saying. Glad someone did understand me correctly