Items tagged with Imagination Technologies
In a short statement posted to its website, Imagination Technologies on Thursday announced it has entered into a new multi-year license agreement with Apple, which at one time was the company's biggest customer before a high-profile breakup two years ago sent its stock spiraling downward, ultimately leading to a sale. Call it a savvy business move or just plain savage, but from the outside looking in, Apple appears to be the clear winner in this deal. We can't say for sure because terms of the agreement have not been specified. However, we do know that Apple continued to thrive after ending its relationship with Imagination Technologies in 2017, while Imagine Technologies floundered in the wake...
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It has been a rough few months for Imagination Technologies, the British-based semiconductor company that was founded over three decades ago as VideoLogic. Shares of the company recently tumbled after it was announced by Apple, by far the company's biggest customer, that it planned to design its own mobile GPU cores moving forward. Now Imagination is up for sale and it could be Intel that swoops in. Imagination said it has been contacted by a "number of parties" inquiring about a potential acquisition of the entire company. No deal is imminent, but in light of the interest—and the fact that Apple is venturing out on its own—Imagination has decided to officially list itself for sale. The company...
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Imagination Technologies may have just lost its biggest customer. The company said it's been notified by Apple that it no longer plans to license the firm's graphics processing technology and will instead build its own mobile GPUs for use in its iPhone and iPad devices. The phase-out is to occur in 15 months to two years. Barring a renegotiation, this is a bit hit to Imagination Technologies. Apple has been licensing the firm's intellectual property for many years, dating back to when the iPod was relevant. The company's graphics IP is found in several of Apple's products, including its iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Apple Watch devices. This arrangement accounts for around half of Imagination Technologies'...
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With the incredible amount of product that Apple pushes, and the company's knack for secrecy, it's easy to understand why Apple would want to use as much in-house hardware as possible. Doing so doesn't just allow Apple to claim that the lion's share of the technology in its devices is its own, but it allows them to to better-tune the products from top to bottom. In 2008, we saw the company acquire chip producer PA Semi, which eventually resulted in the creation of Apple's A-series chips. Now, according to Ars Technica, we could see the company next snatch up Imagination Technologies. You might not know the Imagination Technologies name, but chances are good that you've used one of its products:...
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Imagination Technologies envisions its new PowerVR Series7 architecture powering the next billion mobile and embedded GPUs. As the latest generation of the PowerVR Rogue GPU architecture, the PowerVR Series7 represents a robust lineup that's scalable from 16 to 512 arithmetic logic units (ALUs), which translates into 20+ GFLOPS to near 1.5TFLOPS of performance. The company is targeting a wide range of products, everything from wearables and IoT (Internet of Things) devices (Series7XE GPUs), to next-generation servers and 3D gaming consoles (Series7XT GPUs). "With graphics-enabled devices entering all aspects of everyday life, it is no longer possible to offer just point solutions. Each new generation...
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Imagination Technologies has announced the first CPU based on its new version of the MIPS architecture. The new P5600 chip (codenamed Warrior) is a 32-bit CPU based on the MIPS Series 5 architecture and is designed to challenge companies like ARM in the embedded and mobile markets. Major features of the new chip include: Support for 40-bit memory extensions, or up to 1TB of RAM rather than the typical 4GB limit associated with 32-bit processors. It's worth noting that there's typically a significant performance hit associated with this kind of work-around for memory addressing in 32-bit chips. A 128-bit SIMD engine (Single Instruction, Multiple Data). Companies like ARM, Intel, and AMD use various...
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For over 10 years, the desktop and mobile graphics space has been dominated by two players: Nvidia and AMD/ATI. After 3dfx collapsed, there was a brief period of time when it looked as though Imagination Technologies might establish itself as a third option. Ultimately, that didn't happen -- the company's tile-based rendering solution, Kyro, failed to gain much mass-market support and faded after two generations. Now, there's a flurry of evidence to suggest that Imagination Technologies plans to re-enter PC market, but from the opposite direction. Rather than building expensive discrete solutions, IT is focused on deploying GPUs that can challenge Nvidia and AMD solutions in tablets, mobile phones,...
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At the iPad 3 next-gen iPad unveiling this week, Apple flashed up a slide claiming that the iPad 2 was 2x as fast as Nvidia's Tegra 3, while the new iPad would be 4x more powerful than Team Green's best tablet. Nvidia's response, delivered by spokesperson Ken Brown, boils down to "Hey guys, it's flattering to be compared to you, but how about a little data on which tests you ran and how you crunched the numbers?" Nvidia is absolutely right to call Apple out on the meaningless nature of such a comparison, and the company is likely feeling a bit dogpiled given that TI was waving unverified webpage benchmarks around less than two weeks ago. Both claimed sets of results are equally invalid, but there's...
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Imagination Technologies Announces Expanded Multimedia Collaboration with Intel and Investment from Intel Capital 2 October 2006 - Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE:IMG; "Imagination") - a leader in System-on-Chip Intellectual Property ("SoC IP") - today announces that it has reached a new major collaboration agreement with Intel Corporation ("Intel"), which extends the licensing and deployment of its graphics and video IP cores for use with Intel's PC, mobile computing and consumer architectures in certain segments. Imagination also announces an investment by Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of Intel. Intel Capital will invest ?5.28m in Imagination,...
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