It's really nice to see Imagination's newly gained openness (see https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Open-Sou... for more context). The company's peak is behind it since Apple slowly dropped their IP. Despite being hurt by their policies during the poulsbo days, I still hope that this isn't a swan song and that it will help their business. Nobody wins with a heavily concentrated GPU market.
>The company's peak is behind it since Apple slowly dropped their IP.
They never did. They are still using IMG's IP even today. Just look at their PVRTC support. It was possibly one of the biggest lie ever and caused their stock to collapse. Now they are sold to a Chinese Capital and are pushing towards competing in PC GPU market.
I think it depends on what you mean by IP and it's unfortunate that the hardware space overloads those terms. My understanding is that they aren't using any IMG hardware IP blocks, and are simply licensing a couple ancient patents.
There are large similarities from Apple hiring large portions of the dev staff though. Apparently IMG capped it's tech staff at £75k/yr total comp and so Apple just opened it's own office across the street.
>I think it depends on what you mean by IP, it's unfortunate that the hardware space overloads those terms.
It really doesn't. IP is very specific.
If you are an architecture licensee of ARM, are you using / or paying for ARM's IP?
If you are designing your 3G modem, using CDMA, ( Whether it is WCDMA, CDMA 2000 or TDS-CDMA ) without using Qualcomm Modem or anything Qualcomm designed hardware blocks, are you using Qualcomm's IP?
We are argue whether Apple needs to pay for Tile based deferred rendering ( You can search the term mentioned on Apple's Dev Reference document ) to IMG, since relevant IP could be obtained with ARM. ( Arguably with cross patent argument with IMG, but anyway let's ignore that ). How are you using technology from IMG PowerVR, even with its name on it, and consider yourself not using any IP from IMG, when the patent itself has not expired. Quote.
"It will no longer use the Group's intellectual property in its new products in 15 months to two years time."
And I could go on about the private equity having its relationship with Apple's supply chain. But I will save politics away from this discussions.
> If you are an architecture licensee of ARM, are you using / or paying for ARM's IP?
> If you are designing your 3G modem, using CDMA, ( Whether it is WCDMA, CDMA 2000 or TDS-CDMA ) without using Qualcomm Modem or anything Qualcomm designed hardware blocks, are you using Qualcomm's IP?
The hardware space overloads the term to mean RTL or lower abstract representations of circuit layouts.
> We are argue whether Apple needs to pay for Tile based deferred rendering ( You can search the term mentioned on Apple's Dev Reference document ) to IMG, since relevant IP could be obtained with ARM. ( Arguably with cross patent argument with IMG, but anyway let's ignore that ). How are you using technology from IMG PowerVR, even with its name on it, and consider yourself not using any IP from IMG, when the patent itself has not expired. Quote.
> "It will no longer use the Group's intellectual property in its new products in 15 months to two years time."
There's not really an argument on if anyone has to pay anyone for TBDR; they don't. This comment thread is on the software for a chip that was a TBDR and is older than max patent length. The concept is in the public domain now. Since this chip came out in 1995, TBDRs have been fair game for nearly seven years now.
>This comment thread is on the software for a chip
I was replying specifically about IP. And the context of Apple not using IMG's IP. Which was "never" the case. As pointed out by IMG’s CEO in 2019 before the 2020 IP renewal.
You can make a new implementations of TBDR renderers without paying anyone.
> I was replying specifically about IP. And the context of Apple not using IMG's IP. Which was "never" the case. As pointed out by IMG’s CEO in 2019 before the 2020 IP renewal.
The point is that the patents (ie. the IP that would matter in this case) have expired for TBDR, despite your claim "We are argue whether Apple needs to pay for Tile based deferred rendering ( You can search the term mentioned on Apple's Dev Reference document ) to IMG, since relevant IP could be obtained with ARM. ( Arguably with cross patent argument with IMG, but anyway let's ignore that )." No cross patent agreements are necessary.
There was some recent 'reverse engineering' of the recent Apple products, mentioned on the web a few months back, particularly how they do SIMD branching/divergence. It sounded remarkably familiar to the PVR SGX/Rogue approach.
Hum, thanks for the headsup, it was my understanding that the Apple "GPU" compute part was mostly built in-house, and that only the fixed-function part were from Imagination at some point, then dropped. I didn't know they were still using it. Would you have more details ?
I think you have all of this right. Parts of IMG IP Apple still uses is the TBDR stuff, compression and some other fixed-function things. It is unclear how much of it Apple has modified. The actual compute and scheduling engine is Apple's own.
