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They originally claimed they completely redesigned it and announced they were therefore going to drop the PowerVR architecture license - that was the reason for

by kimixa 4y ago

They originally claimed they completely redesigned it and announced they were therefore going to drop the PowerVR architecture license - that was the reason for the stock price crash and Imagination Technologies sale in 2017. Then they have since scrubbed the internet of all such claims and to this day pay for an architecture license. I think it's similar to an ARM architecture license - where it's a license for any derived technology and patents rather than actually being given the RTL for powervr-designed cores. I worked at PowerVR during that time (I have Opinions, but will try to keep them to myself), and my understanding was that Apple hadn't actually taken new PowerVR RTL for a number of years and had significant internal redesigns of large units (e.g. the shader ISA was rather different from the PowerVR designs of the time), but presumably they still use enough of the derived tech and ideas that paying the architecture license is necessary. This transfer was only one way - we never saw anything internal about Apple's designs, so reverse engineering efforts like this are still interesting. And as someone who worked on the PowerVR cores (not the Apple derivatives) I can assure you all this discussed in the original post is extremely familiar.

girvo 4y ago
While I can understand why you might not want to in a public forum, I know I’d personally love to hear your Opinions on the matter!
- kimixa 4y ago
  It's a small enough group that I'm likely personally identifiable anyway, so will be vague and try to stick to public info and my personal conjecture. Let's just say that the legal shenanigans of the time caused me to lose my job (part of the sale of Imagination Technologies required closing some countries offices to avoid more interference from various regulatory bodies). Judge bias accordingly. And all their noise about "Ground up redesign using no PowerVR tech" kinda conflicts with them still to this day paying for an architecture license - the very thing that they claimed they would be dropping in their press release that caused the imagination technologies share crash and corresponding sale. And this is without even going to court - they issued a press release then immediately relented (and have continued to relent for over 5 years now) at the slightest question. And then scrubbed all mention of that press release. My general suspicion is apple intended to game the market by intentionally dropping the share price and simply purchase PowerVR at a discount - but in the process pissed off enough people that they rejected the offer, even if it was "better" in terms of value. Or just let them go under and pick everything they want off the resulting fire sale - I heard rumors that apple had already put in an offer to purchase the company that was rejected, and under UK regulation a failed takeover attempt can't be re-attempted for some time, that much of this happened within (again, according to fuzzy scuttlebutt, nothing definite) That or the legal/C-suite of apple don't actually speak to the engineers of apple anymore - they honestly thought that it was a completely ground-up design that didn't derive anything from PowerVR tech, and just send out the press release thinking "Why are we paying for this??" - then the engineers shuffled in saying that actually they couldn't put together anything better that wasn't a direct derivative, and their noise about a completely internally designed-from-scratch apple GPU was a bit of a stretch.

by kimixa 4y ago

girvo 4y ago

While I can understand why you might not want to in a public forum, I know I’d personally love to hear your Opinions on the matter!

kimixa 4y ago
It's a small enough group that I'm likely personally identifiable anyway, so will be vague and try to stick to public info and my personal conjecture. Let's just say that the legal shenanigans of the time caused me to lose my job (part of the sale of Imagination Technologies required closing some countries offices to avoid more interference from various regulatory bodies). Judge bias accordingly. And all their noise about "Ground up redesign using no PowerVR tech" kinda conflicts with them still to this day paying for an architecture license - the very thing that they claimed they would be dropping in their press release that caused the imagination technologies share crash and corresponding sale. And this is without even going to court - they issued a press release then immediately relented (and have continued to relent for over 5 years now) at the slightest question. And then scrubbed all mention of that press release. My general suspicion is apple intended to game the market by intentionally dropping the share price and simply purchase PowerVR at a discount - but in the process pissed off enough people that they rejected the offer, even if it was "better" in terms of value. Or just let them go under and pick everything they want off the resulting fire sale - I heard rumors that apple had already put in an offer to purchase the company that was rejected, and under UK regulation a failed takeover attempt can't be re-attempted for some time, that much of this happened within (again, according to fuzzy scuttlebutt, nothing definite) That or the legal/C-suite of apple don't actually speak to the engineers of apple anymore - they honestly thought that it was a completely ground-up design that didn't derive anything from PowerVR tech, and just send out the press release thinking "Why are we paying for this??" - then the engineers shuffled in saying that actually they couldn't put together anything better that wasn't a direct derivative, and their noise about a completely internally designed-from-scratch apple GPU was a bit of a stretch.