Apple To Develop Own GPU, Drop Imagination's GPUs From SoCs
by Ryan Smith on April 3, 2017 6:30 AM ESTThe Future: Competition, Secrecy, & the Unexpected
Finally, while Apple developing their own GPU is not unexpected given their interests and resources, the ramifications of it may very well be. There hasn’t been a new, major GPU vendor in almost a decade – technically Qualcomm’s team would count as the youngest, though it’s a spin-off of what’s now AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group – and in fact like the overall SoC market itself, the market for GPU vendors has been contracting as costs go up and SoC designers settle around fewer, more powerful GPU vendors. So for someone as flush with cash as Apple to join the GPU race is a very big deal; just by virtue of starting development of their own GPU, they are now the richest GPU designer.
Of course, once they start shipping their custom GPU, this will also open them up to patent challenges from those other players. While it has largely been on the backburner of public attention, this decade has seen a few GPU vendors take SoC vendors to court. This includes NVIDIA with Samsung and Qualcomm (a case that they lost), and still ongoing is AMD’s case against LG/MediaTek/Sigma/Vizio.
GPU development is a lot more competitive due to the fact that developers and compiled programs aren’t tied to a specific architecture – the abstraction of the APIs insulates against individual architectures – however it also means that there a lot of companies developing novel technologies, and all of those companies are moving in the same general direction with their designs. This potentially makes it very difficult to develop an efficient GPU, as the best means of achieving that efficiency have often already been patented.
What exists then is an uneasy balance between GPU vendors, and a whole lot of secrets. AMD and NVIDIA keep each other in check with their significant patent holdings, Intel licenses NVIDIA patents, etc. And on the flip side of the coin, some vendors like Qualcomm simply don’t talk about their GPUs, and while this has never been stated by the company, the running assumption has long been that they don’t want to expose themselves to patent suits. So as the new kid on the block, Apple is walking straight into a potential legal quagmire.
Unfortunately, I suspect this means that we’ll be lucky to get any kind of technical details out of Apple on how their GPUs work. They can’t fully hide how their CPUs work due to how program compilation works (which is why we know as much as we do), but the abstraction provided by graphics APIs makes it very easy to hide the inner-workings of a GPU and make it a black box. Even when we know how something works, features and implementation details can be hidden right under our noses.
Ultimately today’s press release is a bit bitter-sweet for all involved in the industry. On the one hand it absolutely puts Imagination, a long-time GPU developer, on the back foot. Which is not to spell doom and gloom, but the company will have to work very hard to make up for losing Apple. On the other hand, with a new competitor in the GPU space – albeit one we’ve been expecting – it’s a sign that things are about to get very interesting. If nothing else, Apple enjoys throwing curveballs, so expect the unexpected.
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madwolfa - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Indeed. Imagine the cost savings on the patents litigation alone.prisonerX - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Then imagine the cost of the stockholder litigation and subsequent payouts.NetMage - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
If Apple cared, they could buy them at pre-announcement pricing but if they cared, they would own them already.Henry 3 Dogg - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
This is not about shaving a few cents off a chip.Apple produced it's own ARM cores to have THE fastest, most efficient ARM cores.
Apple want something from their GPU that Imagination simply wasn't providing them with.
And it could be as simple as control.
- Knowing that new design releases are synchronised to their own product releases, to ensure that they are first to market.
- Knowing that their requirements of the GPU aren't giving hints to the outside world about what they are doing.
- Maybe just that IT's rate of spend on it's GPU R&D, and therefore progress, was just less than Apple wanted.
But I think that it's going to be something more than that.
I suspect Apple want one, very scalable GPU design that they can use across their product range.
And I suspect that they want fast hardware ray tracing for VR applications.
And I suspect that they want power sipping mundane 2D graphics.
And I suspect there are DSP things that they want to do for their Camera[s].
And I suspect that they want to integrate these things VERY closely together.
So closely, that it might hint where they are off to.
Torrijos - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
I think this might be on the nose...It isn't an accident that Apple also invited journalists to announce their commitment to the pro market...
For me the first step will be the iMac, (iMac Pro was even mentioned)...
I think Apple wanted control because they felt that by the time they adapted the third parties GPUs to their designs, they were outdated and underpowered.
We'll probably see this year refreshed iMacs with a GPU made by Apple. Scaling between models pricing.
OpenGL, OpenCL but mainly Metal (dsp for certain task, management of screen refresh rates etc), maybe HSA (that is wishful thinking though).
Still they will hopefully allow better handling of external GPUs though (for CUDA).
Then when the data is in, they'll be able to finalise the design of the GPUs for the 2018 Mac Pros, in case anything was wrong or unexpected. Apple in the "i" era has been very iterative with great success.
Cliff34 - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
Maybe they want to get into the VR arena and want to develop it in-house rpSupaNova - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
Nope Apple has been designing its own GPU for a while, this is just the confirmation.So those looking for huge increases in speed going forward are going to be disappointed
EnzoLT - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
I feel like this is more of a negotiation tactic than anything.sagor808 - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
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