Imagination Formally Announces It's Selling Itself

[Vistaus]

But the reason the government bailed out GM is because they didn't want owners of those cars to have to worry about the ability to have their cars repaired. I don't agree with this reasoning but that's a tangent. What similar argument exists for Imagination Technologies?

None? Not sure if you've noticed, but Imagination Technologies is based in the UK, not in the US. Would be kinda weird for the US government to spend tax payers' money to buy a UK-based company, wouldn't it?

[starshipeleven]

None? Not sure if you've noticed, but Imagination Technologies is based in the UK, not in the US. Would be kinda weird for the US government to spend tax payers' money to buy a UK-based company, wouldn't it?

Trump can probably pull this off though, even if it is blatantly against his official political agenda

[M@GOid]

You mean "immersion"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersion_v._Sony

That's a completely different company. PowerVR have never once filed a single patent suit.

Oops, yeah you are right. That happened a long time ago and I got confused. Thanks for the clarification.

[name99]

They could attempt a buy if they think it's cheaper than the impending lawsuit.

Ahh, the joy of commenting on something you know nothing about --- but even so you're sure who's wrong. Often in error, but never in doubt.
Apple DID consider buying Imagination, and discussed this seriously with them. At the time (and as dar as I know still) Apple owned 10% of the company.

The timeline appears to be that Apple negotiated (probably somewhat successfully) with the previous CEO, Hossein Yassaie.
Yassaie resigned in Feb 2016 to be replaced by Andrew Heath, and Heath seems to have been totally deluded as to the value of the company (this often happens when non-tech CEOs take over a tech company and don't have a clue as to the difference between how good your tech is today vs how good what's in the R&D pipeline is for tomorrow). I'm guessing Apple tried to negotiate with Heath, concluded doing so was a waste of time, and walked away. It seems unlikely they're going to want to deal with him now, unless any deal comes with his walking away immediately...

I'm finding it hard to see why Apple is the bad guy here. They TRIED to buy Imagination. They TRIED to tell Imagination what they needed for the future. It was Imagination (specifically Andrew Heath) that dug its own grave.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/22/apple-confirms-it-considered-buying-imagination-technologies-no-plans-to-buy-now/

[name99]

Every time I hear their name I only remember about the force feedback lawsuits they fired at Nintendo and Sony. I believe they are (or were) also the motive that open hardware entusiasts did not created force feedback hardware, fearing lawsuits from Imagination.

Uhh, that was IMMERSION not Imagination... And was against Sony+MS, NOT Nintendo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersion_v._Sony

[name99]

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.

I think you don't have a clue as to the difference between an API and the implementation of a GPU.
You do realize (just to prove the point) that Apple uses the same Metal API on Macs, which are running Intel, AMD, and nV GPUs?

And IMG does not have "patents on tile-based rendering", they have patents on various small parts of particular implementations of tile-based rendering. Tile-based rendering as a concept dates from work done at UNC around 1989.

Finally the primary advantage of tile-based rendering is that it requires less high-bandwidth memory. This was an important tradeoff point in the early days of smartphones but it becomes less important as high bandwidth memory moves into the mainstream. (Even today iPhone GPU has access to a large L3 cache and a reasonable bandwidth of DDR4 DRAM --- certainly vastly higher than the bandwidths we had available a few years ago; and it's perfectly plausible that the next iPhones uses one of the various wide memory technologies that have been designed for precisely this purpose.) Point is, there is no compelling reason that Apple's future graphics hardware has to be tile-based.

[bug77]

Ahh, the joy of commenting on something you know nothing about --- but even so you're sure who's wrong. Often in error, but never in doubt.
Apple DID consider buying Imagination, and discussed this seriously with them. At the time (and as dar as I know still) Apple owned 10% of the company.

The timeline appears to be that Apple negotiated (probably somewhat successfully) with the previous CEO, Hossein Yassaie.
Yassaie resigned in Feb 2016 to be replaced by Andrew Heath, and Heath seems to have been totally deluded as to the value of the company (this often happens when non-tech CEOs take over a tech company and don't have a clue as to the difference between how good your tech is today vs how good what's in the R&D pipeline is for tomorrow). I'm guessing Apple tried to negotiate with Heath, concluded doing so was a waste of time, and walked away. It seems unlikely they're going to want to deal with him now, unless any deal comes with his walking away immediately...

I'm finding it hard to see why Apple is the bad guy here. They TRIED to buy Imagination. They TRIED to tell Imagination what they needed for the future. It was Imagination (specifically Andrew Heath) that dug its own grave.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/22/ap...ns-to-buy-now/

So what part of this makes a further buying attempt impossible?

What could make Apple the bad guy is if they built their GPU on top of Imagination IP. Which is what Imagination's lawsuit is trying to find out. If Apple's in the wrong and they risk being fined X and on the other hand they can buy Imagination for a third of that, what do you think they'll do?

And one again, we don't know if Apple's in the wrong here, at the moment it's their word against Imagination's word. Nobody's badmouthing your preciousss.

[bnolsen]

Maybe nintendo could purchase them? Considering the switch was just released the purchase would be out of cycle.