According to a press release from Imagination Technologies, the group has been approached by multiple entities who are interested in acquiring them. None of these potential buyers have been mentioned by name, however. The press release also makes it clear that the group is only announcing that discussions have started, and that other interested parties can contact their financial adviser, Rothschild, to join in.
It’s entirely possible that nothing could come from these discussions, but Imagination Technologies clearly wants as many options to choose from as possible.
This announcement is clearly related to the recent news that Apple plans to stop licensing technology from them, which made up about half of the whole company’s revenue at the time. The press release states that they are still in dispute with Apple with a dedicated, highly visible, single-line paragraph. As far as I know, Apple hasn’t yet provided proof that they are legally clear of Imagination Technology’s licenses, and the press release claims that they still dispute Apple’s claims.
Hopefully we’ll hear more concrete details in the near future.
me thinks Intel will buy them
me thinks Intel will buy them
What was already posted.
What was already posted. Intel should buy Imagination and maybe start moving in the GPU business seriously. Not just by throwing money. While I would love to see AMD becoming in the future as big as Intel is today, a third GPU option for consumers would have been nice. Intel need GPUs. CPUs and ASICs are nice, but they do need GPUs also.
amd should buy them and use
amd should buy them and use the ip to avenge adreano. Also this would give them a gpu to pair with their absent arm core or a low power x86 cpu for mobile.
Bad idea. Avenging in
Bad idea. Avenging in business usually means losing money for no reason. And they do have a GPU, they do have an architecture they are trying to put in every market they can. Not to mention that in their current financial state they barely can develop GCN. Paying a billion dollars to only have a second GPU architecture in the house, it would be suicidal.
Personally I think there are
Personally I think there are only 3 real owners of Imagination.
1) Apple
2) Samsung
3) Tesla
Apple, for pretty obvious reasons, every single iOS device has had some form of Imagination GPU, and therefore a lot of the heavy optimisations done in iOS require imagination GPUs, so, therefore, a hell of a lot of rewriting would have to be done, also this negates the need for Apple to design its own from scratch and stepping on the landmine field that is patent litigation. not to mention that buying imagination is a shit ton cheaper than designing your own GPU from scratch.
Samsung on the other hand, is pretty much to spite Apple, but to also bolster it’s own portfolio, Samsung makes pretty much everything, from CPU cores, to CPU manufacturing, to DRAM and OLEDs and LCDs, one this notably absent from Samsung’s portfolio is a custom GPU, now they are designing one, and they aren’t as reliant on a single supplier like Apple is, but still, them buying Imagination would be a helluva lot cheaper than continuing to design their own, and unlike Apple, Samsung could continue to license out IP from imagination to earn back some of the revenue.
Lastly Tesla, this one is a bit more of a wildcard, but mainly because of Tesla Vision, AI and autonomous driving. Tesla hired Jim Keller to design the next gen computer vision system, you don’t hire Jim Keller unless you’re going all out, and the only place for them left to go is GPUs, because I can guarentee you that if Tesla no longer have to pay Nvidia for the Tegra 3 running that 17″ dash and the Drive PX2 for everything else, they’d be happy as Larry.
this is all just speculation of course, but these are the only three that actually make any sense to me.
Apple claims to have done
Apple claims to have done just that (although Imagination doesn't believe them).
Seeing Imagination putting a
Seeing Imagination putting a price tag on themselves, all that “Apple can’t do it” and “we have lawyers too”, back in April, was probably more of an effort to calm down investors and shareholders.
with just how much of iOS is
with just how much of iOS is tied to low-level access to Imagination GPUs, I feel like calling BS on Apple this early on. I could be wrong and they could be further along that we know, but honestly, I don’t see it, yet
I’m still surprised they were
I’m still surprised they were still around. I owned a generation one PowerVR powered Matrox M3D card. It was kind of an interesting card in that it had no video output, it just offloaded some of the processing.