Fallen Tech Star Imagination Technologies Up For Sale After Apple Row Bites (standard.co.uk) 28
UK chip designer Imagination Technologies -- which is in dispute with Apple, its largest customer -- has put itself up for sale. Shares in the company more than halved in April when Imagination said that Apple was to stop using its technology. From a report: The firm was regarded as a leading light in Britain's burgeoning tech sector, but ran into trouble when the phones giant, by far its biggest customer, said it would no longer rely on it for graphics design. Apple accounts for more than half of Imagination's revenues and last year held takeover talks with Imagination. Two parts of the business, MIPS and Ensigma, were already up for sale. Imagination said it has received "interest from a number of parties for a potential acquisition of the whole group." It is in "preliminary discussions" with the aid of bankers from Rothschild.
WHY DO PEOPLE PUT MILK ON THEIR CEREAL?! (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know, I closed slashdot as soon as the fucking ad asked me at top volume!
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...now you have lost your mojo...
Almost sounds like... (Score:5, Insightful)
It almost sounds like Apple decided that Imagination couldn't continue on its own for long, tried to buy it, the offer was refused, so Apple decided to leave them to their fate and moved on...
Re:Almost sounds like... (Score:5, Informative)
It's so common in business it's almost a tautology.
Essentially, if your business' continued existence depends entirely on one supplier or customer... it's not YOUR business, you just haven't figured it out yet. You're more like a department of the supplier or customer's company, in that you are entirely subject to their whims.
Sometimes - especially if it's a symbiotic relationship between companies that are essentially equally powerful - it works out. If, however, you're dealing with a megacorp like Apple and you're not also a megacorp, it's almost certain you'll eventually be crushed and then bought or replaced at some point.
Usually the smaller company is greedy, thinking very short term and/or complacent, and entirely caught off guard when the end finally comes.
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I seem to recall something similar happened with MIPS in the past (ironically, Imagination owns MIPS): MIPS's new design was too important to SGI, and MIPS was in danger of going out of business... so SGI bought MIPS to keep them alive.
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And chances are, Apple will just pick up Imagination Technologies as well. It happens all the time - Jean-Louis Gassee tried to sell Be Inc. to Apple at a hugely inflated price (back in the old days just prior to Jobs' return). Apple decided Be wasn't worth that much and passed on the offer. Obviously they were hoping Apple was desperate enough to just pay anything. Of course, in the end, Apple did pay up... for NeXT, in a deal worth more than what Be was selling for.
Right now, the only real thing Apple wan
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The patents are irrelevant now though. The important ones are the tile based renderer ones, which have all expired - hence why desktop graphics cards have suddenly dropped in power consumption in the past couple of generations.
Who cares? (Score:1)
Another proprietary, we don't release documentation, fu open-source hippies, company bites it. So what.
So ends the saga of PowerVR (Score:2)
They kept 3dfx honest, back in the day, much like the rivalry between AMD and Intel.
IIRC, PowerVR used "tiling" and without looking up the details, I'll probably mangle the history, but it was an interesting blip in the development of GPUs.
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You make it sound like PowerVR was just a competing product to the 3DFX Voodoo. They continued to make PowerVR chips long after that:
They stopped making desktop graphics chips. The last desktop-class chip that PowerVR produced (the Kyro II, based on their third generation hardware) was released in 2001, which was roughly coincident with the end of 3dfx. PowerVR took the work that they had done on their fourth generation product, cancelled the Kyro 3, and retargeted it at mobile-class power loads. This resulted in the MBX and MBX Lite chips, one of which was used in the iPhone and iPhone 3G.
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it was an interesting blip in the development of GPUs.
You make it sound like PowerVR was just a competing product to the 3DFX Voodoo. They continued to make PowerVR chips long after that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR
Most of the iPhones use PowerVR (see GPU column):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_mobile_application_processors#List_of_Apple_processors
Without Apple they're now rather short on customers and in trouble. The Chinese seem to want their own processor technology so I could well see a Chinese company buying them out.
I don't ever remember PowerVR being a competitor for 3dfx Voodoo in Canada or the US. I remember Matrox and ATI being 3dfx competitors. Perhaps it was a regional thing since PowerVR is located in the UK. I had a VooDoo 2 card then upgraded to a Matrox G400.
http://www.techspot.com/articl... [techspot.com]
Apple has stolen all they need (Score:1)
from Imagination, since they provided the circuit designs to Apple, who are now confident they can make a competitive chip based on Imagination's designs, and have their government keep their back so they will never go to court for it.
The very particular disgusting flavor of American IP theft and protectionism.
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No kidding. Then again that's Apple for you. Compare this with Qualcomm. When they needed a GPU design, they basically bought a small company a lot of people thought was vaporware, (Bitboys), and an ex-ATI team and made the Adreno GPU. Which they still use today.
uh (Score:5, Funny)
Re: uh (Score:3)
Slashdot Noun Pile Headline Train Crash Ambiguity Puzzles Readers
Dear Slashdot Your Headlines Suck (Score:4, Insightful)
please fix, kthxbye.
Fun fact: you are NOT a printed newspaper, where every inch is precious. You can use things like pronouns, articles, the word "is", etc. (Oh look, sometimes you do -- the very next post is "Stephen Hawking Says He Is Convinced That Humans Need To Leave Earth".)
Also, try to avoid slang. I'm not sure what is meant by "Apple Row Bites". I *think* it means they were hurt (bitten) by a fight (row) with Apple?
OK, now I see that you simply copied the headline from the source -- But You Capitalized Every Word And Made It Worse. Can you see how much easier this is to read? "Fallen tech star Imagination Technologies up for sale after Apple row bites" It's arguable if you should use title case or not, but it's DEFINITELY wrong to capitalize every word. When I first read the headline, I thought it meant that technologies belonging to Tech Star Imagination were up for sale.
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sounds like Commenter Upset Editors Fail Providing Headline Sufficiently Readable.
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