Apple, former partner Imagination Technologies ink new licensing agreement
UK-based chipmaker Imagination Technologies on Thursday announced Apple has replaced a licensing agreement first signed in 2014, though details of the deal, including what technology it covers, remain unknown.
Announced in a brief press release posted to Imagination's website, the new agreement sees Apple pay out licensing fees for multi-year rights to a "wider range" of the British firm's intellectual property. What IP is involved in the agreement was not divulged in today's statement:
In April 2017, Imagination announced Apple planned to stop using the firm's IP in its hardware designs by 2019. The firm was heavily reliant on licensing revenue from the iPhone maker, which came out to some $81 million in fiscal 2017. Apple's abrupt pullout left Imagination flailing to stay alive as its stock plummeted.
Shortly after the announced breakup, Imagination entered a "dispute resolution process", accusing Apple of "unauthorized use of Imagination's confidential information and Imagination's intellectual property rights." In its defense, Apple said it stopped accepting new IP from Imagination in 2015, adding that the firm only decided to apprise its shareholders of the situation after Apple invoked a contract clause to pay lower royalty rates.
The chipmaker sought to sell itself in June 2017 and ultimately found a buyer in China-backed equity firm Canyon Bridge.
For years, Apple relied on Imagination's PowerVR technology in its A-series system-on-chip designs, silicon that can still be found in certain iPads, Apple Watch Series 3 and Apple TV 4K. In 2017, however, Apple introduced its own integrated GPU design with the A11 Bionic chip powering iPhone 8 and iPhone X. Subsequent A-series designs rely solely on Apple tech.
Announced in a brief press release posted to Imagination's website, the new agreement sees Apple pay out licensing fees for multi-year rights to a "wider range" of the British firm's intellectual property. What IP is involved in the agreement was not divulged in today's statement:
A former Apple collaborator in the GPU design space, Imagination saw its fortunes tumble in 2017 when the tech giant decided to shift GPU operations in-house.Imagination Technologies ("Imagination") announces that it has replaced the multi-year, multi-use license agreement with Apple, first announced on February 6, 2014, with a new multi-year license agreement under which Apple has access to a wider range of Imagination's intellectual property in exchange for license fees.
In April 2017, Imagination announced Apple planned to stop using the firm's IP in its hardware designs by 2019. The firm was heavily reliant on licensing revenue from the iPhone maker, which came out to some $81 million in fiscal 2017. Apple's abrupt pullout left Imagination flailing to stay alive as its stock plummeted.
Shortly after the announced breakup, Imagination entered a "dispute resolution process", accusing Apple of "unauthorized use of Imagination's confidential information and Imagination's intellectual property rights." In its defense, Apple said it stopped accepting new IP from Imagination in 2015, adding that the firm only decided to apprise its shareholders of the situation after Apple invoked a contract clause to pay lower royalty rates.
The chipmaker sought to sell itself in June 2017 and ultimately found a buyer in China-backed equity firm Canyon Bridge.
For years, Apple relied on Imagination's PowerVR technology in its A-series system-on-chip designs, silicon that can still be found in certain iPads, Apple Watch Series 3 and Apple TV 4K. In 2017, however, Apple introduced its own integrated GPU design with the A11 Bionic chip powering iPhone 8 and iPhone X. Subsequent A-series designs rely solely on Apple tech.
Comments
2) The long rumored switch of (at least some of) MacBooks from Intel processors to A series processors. And again, that would require improved graphics capabilities and again could be why Apple asked for help.
Yeh, actually, I wish Apple had done the same with Huawei (licensed their technology) rather than stooping down to crappy, crooked Qualcomm to get a 5G modem.
So what are these failures you’ve come up with?
If you think Apple would license core communications tech from a CCP-run knockoff shop, you don’t know Apple very well.
I would assume that this is nothing but the new reduced royalty licensing agreement that Apple wanted to negotiate back in 2015.
edited to correct it's "Imagination", not of "AMD".
Actually, Intel was given the opportunity to produce chips for the original iPhone years ago, but passed on the opportunity. By the time Intel stopped reporting separate results for mobile chips, they had lost $5 billion. Now Intel struggles to keep up with the world's largest chip manufacturer (by market capitalization), TSMC (ticker TSM). Intel is years behind TSMC, due to failure to invest in new equipment for chip manufacturing. AMD, Apple and many others only do chip design, and give manufacturing contracts to the best chip fabrication companies. Right now, most 7nm chips are made by TSMC. By the time Intel gets to 7nm, TSMC will be producing 3nm chips, with much better speed, lower battery consumption and less heat output than Intel.
One of the reasons Windows Phone failed was that MSFT tried to shoe-horn bloated Windows into a mobile phone. Another was that MSFT did not act fast enough to prevent Apple and Google (Android) from gaining a dominant market share. No one wanted to develop for Windows Phone, or developed for it only after Android and iOS. By the time Windows Phone development was killed, it had less than one-half of one percent of world phone sales marketshare. Most of the current GUI Apple OS variants are derived from BSD Unix (by way of NextOS, then OS X/MacOS), but have user interfaces tailored to the device. Android is largely based on Linux. Both BSD Unix and Linux are multi-platform, while full implementations of Windows run mostly on x86. The ARM Windows emulator seems similar to WINE for Unix/Linux. (WINE = Wine Is Not an Emulator, meaning it is a compatibility layer, used by developers to port software from Windows to Unix-like systems).
Most of the chip design and fabrication companies poach employees from each other. Apple picked-up a large number of Intel employees with the acquisition of the majority of Intel's cellular operations. All of the most recent iPhone models have Intel cellular chips. Apple has acquired chip related employees from AMD and IBM. Apple may also have some folks from GlobalFoundries (which acquired chip manufacturing facilities from AMD, Samsung and IBM about a decade ago). GlobalFoundries and TSMC do a lot of chip manufacturing for a lot of firms (AMD, Huawei, IBM and many of the major phone manufacturers in the US and China) that design their own chips, then contract out for manufacturing. Few (if any) of the major cell phone brands do their own SoC/CPU/GPU chip manufacturing. Samsung was planning to spend billions to re-enter cutting edge chip manufacturing, but has backed away from that major expense.