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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
144 Comments
View All Comments
DJFriar - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
Except Apple didn't manipulate the market, did they? (honest question here). If Apple told Imagination during a phone call they were looking at dropping them in 18-24 months, and Imagination went and made that information public, would that really be Apple manipulating the market? It would seem it would have required Apple to make the public statement. Or is who said it not at all relevant in these kind of cases?fanofanand - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
If that's illegal market manipulation I would LOVE to see how the Nokia/Microsoft deal went down. If THAT transaction was legal how it went down, I don't know what could possibly be viewed as a market manipulation tactic. To eliminate your product line, driving down the stock to previously unimaginable levels, then selling the company to a group that is hiring you and you stand to make millions off the sale, and THAT was legal? This would be nothing compared to that.prisonerX - Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - link
Public corporations are required to release information that materially changes their circumstances as soon as they receive it. It's irrelevant who creates that information.name99 - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
Oh, take off your tin-foil hat.We know the sequence of events.
https://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/03/apple-acquir...
One year ago Apple talked to Imagination. Imagination probably thought they were indispensable nd could charge whatever they wanted ("OK, our market cap is 500 million pounds, so how about we'll sell for 650 million") to which Apple said basically "fsck you. We've given you our price, take it or leave it".)
These company sales negotiations are not especially rational.
Company CEOs who got there through the science/engineering route tend to be too TIMID, too scared that what they've done can easily be copied, and so they sell too cheap.
On the other hand, company CEOs who got there through sales or finance tend to have a wildly over-inflated view of how unique and special their technology is, and so insist on unrealistically high sales prices. This second looks to me like what happened here --- too many IMG execs drank their own koolaid, asking things like "what's a reasonable P/E multiplier? Or should we price based on annual revenue" NT "how hard would it be to duplicate what we offer". Especially when you factor in that all the most ambitious engineers at IMG would likely be happy to leave for Apple if an offer were, regardless of who owns IMG, just because Apple will give them more scope for grand projects.
Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - link
Well, I don't know how many Imagination engineers would want to up sticks from Cambridge, England and move to California. Some, of course, but probably not many. I don't think Apple has an engineering presence in the UK.But generally yes, there must be quite a few people feeling sick and rather stupid in Cambridge this week. CSR, who are next door, sold themselves to Qualcomm last year and it's done them no harm.
name99 - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Why would you imagine that the largest company in the world only has engineering employees in California?Apple has a UK headquarters today, which it is in the process of moving to a substantial new building, basically the UK equivalent of the new Cupertino spaceship campus. (Not identical because this is space Apple is renting, but presumably it will be "Apple-ized"...)
http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/29/13103702/apple-u...
lefty2 - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
I wonder if they are still going to be support Imagination's PVR format (That's a proprietary texture format). Practically every OpenGL game in the App store is using the PVR format, so if they pulled support for it that would cause mayham.Hamm Burger - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
Excellent article, particularly considering how quickly it was posted following the press release.One thing, though: it doesn't specifically mention VR, a field of which Tim Cook has said (among a few other pronouncements) “I don’t think it’s a niche, […] It’s really cool and has some interesting applications.” Could it be that Apple has decided that it needs its own architecture to do VR better than the competition?
ATC9001 - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
I think you're right...I think they are eyeing VR/augmented reality and hedging on needing more GPU power. Hell, Intel's current (maybe past now) push with Iris was spurred by Apple forcing them to get stronger IGP.They wanted better CPU performance and said hell we can do this better ourselves and they did with cyclone and blew everyone away. They'll do the same with the GPU...
DroidTomTom - Monday, April 3, 2017 - link
This was my first thought too. This is the only field where a drastic departure from the status quo can have a big impact because it is still in its infancy. More power efficiency is really needed to make that push to good enough visual quality in a portable mobile design. They are currently falling behind in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to HTC, Samsung, Sony, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google.