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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SaolDan - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
Lolxype - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Last year I read reports that AMD and Apple are "cooperating on GPUs", and I assumed the thinner MBP GPUs were the result of that. But maybe those were just a first step?GraXXoR - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Now that their share price has tanked 70% they can be bought out by Apple for a fraction of their previous price. Nicely done, Apple!Zingam - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Let the patent infringement law suits begin!!!R3MF - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Given the logic expressed in this article as to why Apple pursued autonomy in the CPU space, and how the forms a lens for us to look at their GPU ambitions, surely it makes more sense for them to tank ImTech's share price... and then buy them.It gives them a world class GPU tech and patent portfolio... and their very own CPU architechure (MIPS).
SydneyBlue120d - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Could it make sense for Mediatek to buy Imagination?vladx - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
It could, but I doubt it unless Imagination loses against Apple and gets valued much lower than even now.Ananke - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Apple made two large R&D investments in China, and last week agreed to two more R&D facilities in China. All these engineers and billion dollar investments there should be kept busy, and Apple will need to cut somewhere in the US.If Apple doesn't invest in China, and eventually doesn't transfer know how and technology there, Chinese will shut the market for them - like they did several times already, with "iStore" outages :) :)
DezertEagle - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
I'd like to believe this is a smart move considering Imagination Technologies just brokered a deal w/ Qualcomm and because Apple's HW secrets seem to be compromised by agencies affiliated w/ the CIA.Ever since 2011, the year Microsoft/Nvidia turned it's graphics API's (i.e. DirectX 11+) into undetectable ominous spyware, I've been increasingly paranoid these outsourced GPU/SoC architectures have opened up arbitrary but functional methods for injecting unmanaged code into their host operating systems. I've read several stories of Qualcomm having an extensive dirty little past of surveillance secrets embedded in their devices.
So my major point of contention here is: If IMG Tech uses the same PowerVR architecture for both Apple and Qualcomm/Android, would this enable hacked Qualcomm devices to become a test bench for designing software & firmware to infect Apple products?
HomeworldFound - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
You really don't need a hardware back door on Apples devices now, the best attacks are performed on automatic backups made by iTunes when a device is connected to the computer or when a device uploads data into the cloud. Apple gets to say it's device security is unaffected by the FBI/CIA while they get basically any information they want with some brute force and court orders.Apple intentionally made the encryption applied to those backups weaker. Apple got it's way