ksec

ireland said:

ksec said:

That was the first thing I notice in the previous post about next gen Retail design. Those LED flat lighting system looks far too bright. ( At least in picture ) And it kind of made the Store feels less spacious with the overhead being "cramped".

Seeing customer videos of outside and inside the Brussels store those brightness concerns seem unfounded. And regarding the store feeling less spacious with these new ceilings, I'm not sure what gives you that idea, because my initial reaction was the exact opposite.

sandor said:

well, Fudzilla hasn't been around as long as the iPhone.

I will grant you that they are not a new entity, but 8 years is hardly a long time. Especially when you are looking at rumors stemming from the semiconductor industry & the 40 plus years of coverage from places like eetimes...

Daniel Eran Dilger said:

Apple's Metal is deeply integrated with the design of the PowerVR series6 GPU architecture (and its subsequent versions). Developing an entirely new non-PowerVR GPU architecture would also require redesigning Metal, just as it's being adopted, 3 years out of the gate.

Apple already significantly customizes PowerVR GPU IP to develop proprietary versions of GPU cores that aren't available in similar, "off the shelf" versions for other vendors--much the same way it develops ARM CPU cores that are compatible with ARMv8-A, but yet are custom and proprietary.

So while Apple will continue to optimize ARM and PowerVR core IP, it currently has no need to run away from existing IP work to develop its own, in-house GPU from the ground up. Just as nobody else benefits from Apple's investment in the A7/A8/A9 CPU design, nobody else can take Apple's PowerVR work and just use it (already). In particular, anyone else who uses PowerVR lacks the benefit of Metal APIs to take full advantage of the architecture. With generic OpenGL ES, there's less of a difference between PowerVR and other GPUs, because the advantage is eaten up in overhead.

And on top of that, nobody is really trying to race Apple in SoC graphics power. Samsung is using mostly generic ARM and ARM Mali graphics IP, and showing little interest in building high end chips, because there's no market for expensive SoCs. Samsung only sells a shrinking number of high end Galaxy phones at very low profit margins, and everyone else is pushing the cost envelope downward, with Google focusing on Android One ~$50 handsets for India and the major volume makers all pursuing a very low-end market in China via the cheapest chips available. Ask Nvidia about the market for high end, mobile graphics chips. There isn't one apart from Apple, which serves itself.

The real custom work Apple might do in SoCs is develop its own mobile baseband, but with Intel/Infineon and Qualcomm desperate for Apple's business, it may be able to initially license their existing IP to create an integrated A10, if doing so made any sense, before doing all the work to duplicate their efforts (and expose itself to some even more desperate IP patent litigation/licensing).