Apple to build in-house GPU. Dropping Imagination Technologies PowerVR

[marldorthegreat]

44 minutes ago, ashypanda said:

only £60odd million in royalties, holy fudge knuckles apple was screwing the crap out of them.

Its called business, apple didst screw them at all. Imagination tech accepted that low of an offer

[Citadelen]

Apple has in fact not announced that they will be switching to in-house development, only that they will no longer be using Imagination. Apple could always switch to in-house development, but I doubt they will, what's more likely is they start licensing tech from either AMD or Nvidia, considering the rumors of Intel switching to using AMD's IP in their GPUs, or as the later ones suggest, even having designed an MCM combining an Intel CPU and AMD GPU. I expect Apple will start to license from AMD now, they already use their GPUs in their MacBook Pros and the Desktop Macs.

[VerticalDiscussions]

Read it on GSMArena xD, this one too lengthy!

[Trixanity]

12 minutes ago, Citadelen said:

Apple has in fact not announced that they will be switching to in-house development, only that they will no longer be using Imagination. Apple could always switch to in-house development, but I doubt they will, what's more likely is they start licensing tech from either AMD or Nvidia, considering the rumors of Intel switching to using AMD's IP in their GPUs, or as the later ones suggest, even having designed an MCM combining an Intel CPU and AMD GPU. I expect Apple will start to license from AMD now, they already use their GPUs in their MacBook Pros and the Desktop Macs.

As the Anandtech article says: why would they hire so many GPU engineers if they're not gonna make their own? They're already doing semi-custom GPUs; they're merely taking it a step further and making their own. With that being said: they'll very quickly run into patent issues if they don't get some kind of license agreement with someone. You can't make a modern GPU without it.

 

The gains are unlikely to be as big as on CPU. Apple made a huge performance-oriented CPU; a CPU that is much bigger and more complex than any in the ARM-space with the costs to match hence no one else does it. The GPU space does not have the same diversity. From what I can tell all GPU vendors are going in pretty much the same direction: tile-based rendering, various forms of compression, Thread Level Parallelism etc. which means Apple can't gain the same from this move unless they have something up their sleeve that no one knows about it.

[Bensemus]

4 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

Snip

If Apple were making a GPU for their computers I would agree but for iOS they already have direct control over everything except the devs and they have them in a very tight spot. I don't think it will be that hard for Apple to create a GPU for their mobile devices that has competitive performance. 

[sazrocks]

8 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

Yes I am sure: there's more to in house designing for Apple to master: AMD Radeon cards are almost always more powerful than Nvidia counterparts in terms of hardware yet the Nvidia cards are usually equal with less compute units and speed or even faster in real world applications (games) It's all because optimization and working closely with everybody in the chain: The OS, API designers, Game Engine designers and Game Asset designers.

 

So Apple would have to basically invest not only in the hardware but also in an entire ecosystem so their games would work well with their in house GPU. That is definitively not gonna happen anytime soon.

 

Rather Apple will focus on just like a handful of apps oriented towards workstation and design work to work really well with it and that's about it really. There is currently almost no market for games on Apple desktops. The mobile games are very simple games that require no optimization to run ok so it wouldn't take that much to get the mobile games working just fine on it. Desktop games however, that's another thing and I don't see any indication they'll go balls deep into gaming and if they where, it wouldn't be for desktop games they'd make a console or portable console that's more dedicated than iphones instead.

I'm confused, who said anything about desktops? 

 

And mobile will will work because of the reasons you listed.

[zMeul]

question: who's IPs would Apple licence for the future?

 

answer: no one

 

reasoning: iOS uses Apple's Metal graphics API, which is a proprietary API not found on any 3rd party platform - since Apple doesn't use OpenGL, OpenGL ES nor Vulkan, Apple doesn't have to licence any of the tech to make those APIs compatible / viable to their echosystem

[JoostinOnline]

I feel super bad for Imagination Technologies PLC right now.  Their stock has plummeted.

[Trixanity]

30 minutes ago, zMeul said:

question: who's IPs would Apple licence for the future?

 

answer: no one

 

reasoning: iOS uses Apple's Metal graphics API, which is a proprietary API not found on any 3rd party platform - since Apple doesn't use OpenGL, OpenGL ES nor Vulkan, Apple doesn't have to licence any of the tech to make those APIs compatible / viable to their echosystem

Yeah, it's not really like Apple is currently licensing APIs from Imagination.

 

What they need to license is GPU patents unless they can obscure how it works to a degree where a lawsuit becomes difficult. Well, unless they've found a way to make a GPU that does not infringe on any existing patents which is currently hard to believe.

[Droidbot]

Just now, Trixanity said:

Yeah, it's not really like Apple is currently licensing APIs from Imagination.

 

What they need to license is GPU patents unless they can obscure how it works to a degree where a lawsuit becomes difficult. Well, unless they've found a way to make a GPU that does not infringe on any existing patents which is currently hard to believe.

inb4 they go the Intel route and just buy use of the GPU patents from AMD

[PepperButt]

usually i love this kind of decisions companies make because they can lower the cost of their product or add in extra hardware with same price

but then this is apple...

[randomhkkid]

19 hours ago, ashypanda said:

only £60odd million in royalties, holy fudge knuckles apple was screwing the crap out of them.

 

19 hours ago, Trixanity said:

I agree. I scratched my head at that. I would have thought Imagination made at least a billion from this deal given how many units Apple are moving and how much revenue they have. For them to only making some 60 million a year is laughable.

 

18 hours ago, marldorthegreat said:

Its called business, apple didst screw them at all. Imagination tech accepted that low of an offer

Imagination technologies only supplied the Rogue IP, this is the same IP they otherwise developed for other people apart from Apple. The way it worked was Apple took the GPU core design tweaked and customised it themselves in house. Imagination never even touched an 'Apple GPU' for verification, design or otherwise.

 

4 hours ago, JoostinOnline said:

I feel super bad for Imagination Technologies PLC right now.  Their stock has plummeted.

Yep their numerous employees who took stock instead of pay rises because of recent (before this) financial troubles.

[Trixanity]

9 minutes ago, randomhkkid said:

 

 

Imagination technologies only supplied the Rogue IP, this is the same IP they otherwise developed for other people apart from Apple. The way it worked was Apple took the GPU core design tweaked and customised it themselves in house. Imagination never even touched an 'Apple GPU' for verification, design or otherwise.

 

Yep their numerous employees who took stock instead of pay rises because of recent (before this) financial troubles.

I'm well aware. The sum is still ridiculously small considering Apple's revenue and how important their license agreement was.

[Starelementpoke]

At 11: Apple announcing they're starting to make power supplies and other computer components. So you can have an Apple PC, without it being an Apple PC.

[Shepanator]

It's quite obvious whats going to happen.

 

Imagination announce apple are no longer licensing their GPU designs, their stock price plummets, apple acquires Imagination for a bargain basement price along with all their tasty IP, which apple can then use to develop their own in-house GPUS without needing to license anything.

[AlTech]

Mods, sorry if this is a duplicate, I did not find any article about this on the forums.

 

Apple has shown interest recently in ditching Imagination Technologies' PowerVR Graphics Products. These products are used in Apple's A series of SOCs and typically provide $75+ million US dollars of revenue to Imagination Technologies and Apple has been their primary customer for some time.

 

Imagination Technologies will likely experience a major blow from this since they are fabless and primarily generate revenue through licensing Intellectual Property which in this case is their GPUs.

 

I wish Apple the very best of Luck. Developing a new architecture without infringing on the millions of patents which already exists is painful enough even for Intel. 

 

I genuinely am excited to see what Apple does with this. If Apple developed their custom GPU business and eventually migrated MacBook and MacBookPro to their custom GPU Architecture then that'd be quite nice.

I know that Apple is no stranger to custom GPUs as the A9X and A8X have shown (Apple custom designed both GPUs based off of Imagination's IP and general product specs).
 

I do think that Imagination needs to step up their game or lower the price tag for their products as I do know that Imagination is one of the most expensive Graphics Providers in the Mobile Space.

 

AnandTech has done a really good job on exploring the implications of this and what this could mean for consumers, OEMs and what have you.

Quote

We typically don’t write about what hardware vendors aren’t going to be doing, but then most things hardware vendors don’t do are internal and never make it to the public eye. However when those things do make it to the public eye, then they are often a big deal, and today’s press release from Imagination is especially so.

In a bombshell of a press release issued this morning, Imagination has announced that Apple has informed their long-time GPU partner that they will be winding down their use of Imagination’s IP. Specifically, Apple expects that they will no longer be using Imagination’s IP for new products in 15 to 24 months. Furthermore the GPU design that replaces Imagination’s designs will be, according to Imagination, “a separate, independent graphics design.” In other words, Apple is developing their own GPU, and when that is ready, they will be dropping Imagination’s GPU designs entirely.

This alone would be big news, however the story doesn’t stop there. As Apple’s long-time GPU partner and the provider for the basis of all of Apple’s SoCs going back to the very first iPhone, Imagination is also making a case to investors (and the public) that while Apple may be dropping Imagination’s GPU designs for a custom design, that Apple can’t develop a new GPU in isolation – that any GPU developed by the company would still infringe on some of Imagination’s IP. As a result the company is continuing to sit down with Apple and discuss alternative licensing arrangements, with the intent of defending their IP rights. Put another way, while any Apple-developed GPU will contain a whole lot less of Imagination’s IP than the current designs, Imagination believes that they will still have elements based on Imagination’s IP, and as a result Apple would need to make lesser royalty payments to Imagination for devices using the new GPU.

 

An Apple-Developed GPU?

From a consumer/enthusiast perspective, the big change here is of course that Apple is going their own way in developing GPUs. It’s no secret that the company has been stocking up on GPU engineers, and from a cost perspective money may as well be no object for the most valuable company in the world. However this is the first confirmation that Apple has been putting their significant resources towards the development of a new GPU. Previous to this, what little we knew of Apple’s development process was that they were taking a sort of hybrid approach in GPU development, designing GPUs based on Imagination’s core architecture, but increasingly divergent/customized from Imagination’s own designs. The resulting GPUs weren’t just stock Imagination designs – and this is why we’ve stopped naming them as such – but to the best of our knowledge, they also weren’t new designs built from the ground up.

What’s interesting about this, besides confirming something I’ve long suspected (what else are you going to do with that many GPU engineers?), is that Apple’s trajectory on the GPU side very closely follows their trajectory on the CPU side. In the case of Apple’s CPUs, they first used more-or-less stock ARM CPU cores, started tweaking the layout with the A-series SoCs, began developing their own CPU core with Swift (A6), and then dropped the hammer with Cyclone (A7). On the GPU side the path is much the same; after tweaking Imagination’s designs, Apple is now to the Swift portion of the program, developing their own GPU.

What this could amount to for Apple and their products could be immense, or it could be little more than a footnote in the history of Apple’s SoC designs. Will Apple develop a conventional GPU design? Will they try for something more radical? Will they build bigger discrete GPUs for their Mac products? On all of this, only time will tell.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11243/apple-developing-custom-gpu-dropping-imagination

[Tomsen]

On 4/3/2017 at 2:51 PM, Sauron said:

I'm curious to see how they'll be able to design a gpu from scratch, without using anyone else's patents, while still maintaining retrocompatibility (I guess you could compile stuff twice if the libraries are all ported...? But then who's going to force devs to do that with old apps?) and without the bugs that take decades of experience and development on an architecture to iron out.

Apple got the money to get a license. They could probably land a deal with anyone if needed.

 

Apple is going to force devs to update their apps if the devs want to keep their apps on Apples platform. They are doing the same in regards to 64-bits IIRC. For all we know, it could just end up with a recompilation. My bets are that most apps only need to be recompiled, a few might need actual changes in the code.

 

On 4/3/2017 at 3:50 PM, Misanthrope said:

Yes I am sure: there's more to in house designing for Apple to master: AMD Radeon cards are almost always more powerful than Nvidia counterparts in terms of hardware yet the Nvidia cards are usually equal with less compute units and speed or even faster in real world applications (games) It's all because optimization and working closely with everybody in the chain: The OS, API designers, Game Engine designers and Game Asset designers.

 

So Apple would have to basically invest not only in the hardware but also in an entire ecosystem so their games would work well with their in house GPU. That is definitively not gonna happen anytime soon.

 

Rather Apple will focus on just like a handful of apps oriented towards workstation and design work to work really well with it and that's about it really. There is currently almost no market for games on Apple desktops. The mobile games are very simple games that require no optimization to run ok so it wouldn't take that much to get the mobile games working just fine on it. Desktop games however, that's another thing and I don't see any indication they'll go balls deep into gaming and if they where, it wouldn't be for desktop games they'd make a console or portable console that's more dedicated than iphones instead.

What you are missing is that Apple is almost in full control of the chain in their eco-system. The same isn't true on more "open" (not as in open-source) platforms like windows.

 

On 4/4/2017 at 7:41 AM, zMeul said:

question: who's IPs would Apple licence for the future?

 

answer: no one

 

reasoning: iOS uses Apple's Metal graphics API, which is a proprietary API not found on any 3rd party platform - since Apple doesn't use OpenGL, OpenGL ES nor Vulkan, Apple doesn't have to licence any of the tech to make those APIs compatible / viable to their echosystem

Thats not how the licensing works.. It is not a license to support software APIs, it is quite literally license to hardware implementation(s).

[Sauron]

5 minutes ago, Tomsen said:

Apple got the money to get a license. They could probably land a deal with anyone if needed.

 

Apple is going to force devs to update their apps if the devs want to keep their apps on Apples platform. They are doing the same in regards to 64-bits IIRC. For all we know, it could just end up with a recompilation. My bets are that most apps only need to be recompiled, a few might need actual changes in the code.

If they buy another license it kind of defeats the purpose though.

 

As for the mass porting, apple has power but not THAT much power. They can't just screw the developers over like that - android still has 4 times their marketshare. If that's what they choose to do the api must be at least very similar, and up to par in terms of functioanlity.

[Tomsen]

22 minutes ago, Sauron said:

If they buy another license it kind of defeats the purpose though.

 

As for the mass porting, apple has power but not THAT much power. They can't just screw the developers over like that - android still has 4 times their marketshare. If that's what they choose to do the api must be at least very similar, and up to par in terms of functioanlity.

Explain why you think it defeats the purpose?

 

Apple got all the power. It is THEIR closed platform. Apples isn't known to be "friendly" to developers, actually they are more known to be "unfriendly".

What API are you thinking of? It just gotta support their current metal API, right?

[Sauron]

Just now, Tomsen said:

Explain why you think it defeats the purpose?

 

Apple got all the power. It is THEIR closed platform. Apples isn't known to be "friendly" to developers, actually they are more known to be "unfriendly".

What API are you thinking of? It just gotta support their current metal API, right?

isn't the whole point to spare money on licenses?

[Tomsen]

Just now, Sauron said:

isn't the whole point to spare money on licenses?

There are probably many point. Apple wants to be in full control. I have been saying this for years, and every year we see Apple getting more and more control of their platform.

 

In regards to cost, they don't need to license a full design. Only the required license not to get into court about patents.