Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

>Some speculate it might descend from PowerVR GPUs, as used in older iPhones, while others believe the GPU to be completely custom. But rumours and speculations are no fun when we can peek under the hood ourselves!

As per IMG CEO, Apple has never not been an IMG customer. ( Referring to period between 2015 and 2019.) Unfortunately that quote, along with that article has simply vanished. It was said during an Interview on a British newspaper / web site if I remember correctly.

"On 2 January 2020, Imagination Technologies announced a new multi-year license agreement with Apple including access to a wider range of Imagination's IP in exchange for license fees. This deal replaced the prior deal signed on 6 February 2014." [1]

The Apple official Metal Feature set document [2], All Apple A Series SoC including the latest A14 supports PVRTC, which stands for PowerVR Texture Compression[3].

It could be a Custom GPU, but it still has plenty of PowerVR tech in it. Just like Apple Custom CPU, it is still an ARM.

Note: I am still bitter at what Apple has done to IMG / PowerVR.

[1] https://www.imaginationtech.com/news/press-release/imaginati...

[2] https://developer.apple.com/metal/Metal-Feature-Set-Tables.p...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PVRTC

> Note: I am still bitter at what Apple has done to IMG / PowerVR.

I'm unfamiliar with this; are you bitter about a lack of attribution that they produced lots of the IP their GPUs are built on?

They're probably talking about Apple suddenly announcing they'd be dropping Imagination out of the blue in 2017.

But in the end it seems they didn't drop? Or are they just licensing a basic IP and building on top?

I remember the IMG stuff being full of bugs

It's really not clear. A licensing agreement was signed between the two early 2020 but the interim hurt IMG a lot, they lost a number of engineers, had to sell off their MIPS business, and the board ultimately put the company up for sale.

Apple stated they will go Custom GPU, depending on how you define Custom, it has plenty of PowerVR tech in it. ( IMG even deleted that Press Release, which you could still find a copy here [1] )

"Apple expects that they will no longer be using Imagination’s IP for new products in 15 to 24 months."

But at no point in time did Apple announced they stop supporting PVRTC. Nor did they make any depreciation notice.

That announcement caused IMG's stock price fall by nearly 80%. IMG was later sold to a Chinese VC. ( Which somehow had some tiny connection linking to Apple, but that is in the conspiracy field so I wont go into it )

And if you look back now, Apple were not telling truth or lying by omission.

Which is what got me to scrutinise every details when they had a battle with Qualcomm. And it was a very different view to what mainstream media tells you.

[1] https://www.displaydaily.com/article/press-releases/discussi...

>And if you look back now, Apple were not telling truth or lying by omission.

From reading this, I'd be mad at the bogus/flimsy stock market (and the restrictions on behavior it imposes on companies to satisfy ever more greedy stockholders) rather than Apple here.

When apple is your customer, they can make or break your company. Of course, you can say that it's a shoddy business practice to lay all your eggs in one basket, but I think it's more complex than that. It's rather difficult to provide services or products to Apple given that they often want their own bespoke everything without investing significant amounts of money into your business, they're just that big of a customer. And not pursuing Apple's business might be a deathwish as that's exactly what all the shareholders would want, it often looks like a strike-the-metal-whilst-it's-hot kind of a situation.

Tangentially, it's far easier to be an ethical underdog than it is to be an ethical winner. But Apple isn't even trying.

Mostly it's a sign that companies nowadays - not apple specifically, but apple included - are too large, breaking the market in all kinds of bad ways. There should be much simpler and harder caps on business size (and/or other large-size discouragements such as tax rates on revenue or some other hard-to-fake metric for size). The extremely wimpy trust-busting rules currently assume no harm until proven otherwise, which is much too high a bar, and much too slow, and much to reliant on the inefficient judicial system to be able to steer a market economy.

Size should not matter. Just don't step in and bail them when they break under their own weight.

Of course, when companies are large enough, shareholder's interests spin off into the regulator's domain, allowing interesting turn of events in the form of bailouts

> Just don't step in and bail them when they break under their own weight

But there's a significant economic cost to society when large companies fail catastrophically like this. Which is why size matters. Large companies mean putting all of our economic eggs in one basket, which is exactly what systems like capitalism are supposed to avoid.

There is also significant cost to society when large companies don't fail, just from their dominant position. Monopoly (and monopsony) is arguably a market failure, and oligopoly or other near-monopoly thus at least a serious market distortion.

There is a cost to society either way.

Reviving a corrupted entity to allow it to continue must have a cost that needs to be weight against the perceived loss of its benefits.

Yes, anything in economics is a tradeoff. But IMO preventing companies from getting so big in the first place is by far the lesser evil in this case.

What's the Qualcomm story?

Tl;dr : Apple decided to attack the Qualcomm business model and planned a 5-10 years strategy against Qualcomm. Shown by Apple Internal document in court. And later lost ( or settled ).

Apple took Qualcomm to court due to 4G/5G patents dispute. And made number of claims which were false, possibly inaccurate or lying by omission.

I initially sided with Apple, quoting Tim Cook

“Despite being just one of over a dozen companies who contributed to basic cellular standards, Qualcomm insists on charging Apple at least five times more in payments than all the other cellular patent licensors we have agreements with combined,”

Fives Times More than others Combined. That is ridiculous. We knew Qualcomm were expensive, but we never had an actual number or up to date figure. This allegation was repeated in all mainstream newspaper and website. There were at least Six other major companies ( Nokia, Samsung, Huawei, ZTE, Ericsson Intel/LG ) with broad wireless patent portfolio. That is Qualcomm = 5x where other companies = x/6. Or 30x difference if x were divided equally between all companies.

This got people furious. And I did too. Despite knowing Qualcomm have the best, this kind of multiple were unheard of.

That is until you sit down and start to run some numbers. It doesn't make any sense. You can add up the low end, high end estimate of all there other six companies patent licensing cost in their investor notes and rounding to the nearest number and it would still be an order of magnitude off the figure Apple were trying to paint.

Apple argued Qualcomm made double dipping because they were earning profits from Qualcomm Modem itself, and they are still charging for patents. As if the design of the Modem itself doesn't cost anything?

And numerous other claims.

At the end instead of going to PR battle with Apple, Qualcomm has shown immense restrain. I guess they knew they would win. And since then I have tremendous respect for their CEO, Steve Mollenkopf's professionalism.

The only person who bother to report all the fact from both side was Shara Tibken from Cnet. Who actually sit in every Apple Qualcomm trial ( There were multiple ) and tweet as well as post update. You can read about it here [1] to make up your own mind.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-and-qualcomm-settle-heres-wh...

Well, if you read about Apple and their relation with suppliers, they're borderline abusive and have been for decades.

I know it's business but they seem a pretty bad customer by most standards.

People don't have to interact with that side plus the public image is super polished.

TL;DR: What you're saying seems perfectly in character.

The other side of the story is equally problematic. QCOM got into hot water for engaging in a pretty abusive licensing model. Here are a couple of examples:

If you wanted to use one QCOM patent, you'd have to pay for a suite of patents that includes IP you have no interest in using.

If you want to use a particular technology, the pricing would depend on the total price of your handset -- even if the difference in handset price has nothing to do with the Qualcomm technology.

Their business is tough because they basically spend years inventing technologies and then more years licensing them and defending their IP in court. Still, if you have to draw a moral/ethical conclusion I'd suggest that (at least in part) Qualcomm brought its 2016 Apple woes upon itself.

Note that Apple set up a large office next to Imagination's in the UK and recruited lots of IMG staff. Probably right to be bitter.

> Apple's has already been recruiting Imagination workers for months, its most prominent get being COO John Metcalfe. Until now, hires were being sent to Apple's main offices in London, or overseas to California.

> The company now has over a dozen listings for graphics-related jobs in South Hertfordshire, the region in which St. Albans and Kings Langley are based.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/07/10/apple-sets-up-off...

Edit to add quotes.

> The Apple official Metal Feature set document, All Apple A Series SoC including the latest A14 supports PVRTC, which stands for PowerVR Texture Compression.

I'm a little confused about why Apple can't support PVRTC after they stopped using PowerVR GPUs in their devices?

PVRTC is a texture format. Its latest incarnation (PVRTC2) was introduced in 2013. Being able to load and render the texture format (whether efficiently or not) doesn't appear to require a licence. I used to use PVRTC assets when developing for the original iPod touch. I can imagine Apple retaining support for the format on new hardware for backwards compatibility reasons, such as being able to load and run apps with PVRTC resources

It could very well be the case that PVRTC resources are no longer rendered using the same tech on modern Apple GPUs, and general performance improvements since 2013 make it a non-issue

I don't think support for the PVRTC format implies that a PowerVR GPU design is in use or that "plenty of PowerVR tech" is present in modern Apple GPUs

Yeah, one of the issues here seems to be the lack of clarity as to how IMG is defining their IP.

We could be at the point where the PVRTC patents are still valid, and Apple is paying those royalties, but there's no IMG RTL left in the GPU.

We could also be at the place where Apple somehow got a perpetual license to IMG's RTL, and the bones of the Apple GPUs are still very very clearly IMG GPUs, but they feel like they can essientially write the company off.

Apple had to keep PVRTC support. Apps were shipping with PVRTC compressed textures and no fallbacks.

What I find interesting is that PVRTC is the very last proprietary IMG format that Apple GPUs support.

IMG introduced an improved PVRTC2 texture compression format in 2012. Yet no Apple device has ever exposed support for it.

It looks like Apple was already thinking ahead back then and wanting to avoid supporting features that would require extra royalties.

Why would IMGT rely on a single customer?

Dodgy business practices.

Most people do the same, work for one entity. It's not that uncommon for companies as well. Thinking about aviation for example.

They used to be somewhat popular in Mediatek SoCs, but not so much recently. I don't know why they're not getting as many design wins recently - maybe they're too expensive or too power hungry.

In the end you can't just get new customers on demand - you have to earn them.

Or their IP simply isn’t very competitive, with Apple doing most of the heavy lifting. After all, the designs Apple used were custom.

It looks like Mali is now the "default" GPU in ARM SoCs; it's probably bundled with the CPU cores.

ARM gives a huge discount if you buy their CPU and GPU together. Hard to compete with that on price, so cheap Chinese SoC use ARM.

Qualcomm bought adreno from AMD (interestingly an anagram for radeon).

Samsung struck a deal to buy from AMD.

Intel moved from PowerVR to their own designs.

And just like that we're out of major chip makers other than Apple or the occasional specialized SoC that probably doesn't sell in huge volume or rake in the cash.

Making things worse, their really cool patents related to early geometry culling expire soon.

> ARM gives a huge discount if you buy their CPU and GPU together.

Yeah, I've heard rumors that ARM+Mali is cheaper than just ARM for the licensing fees.

Whether or not the majority of your company’s revenue comes from a single customer is not in your control. Imagine you are a small company selling 500 widgets a year then Apple calls and orders 50 million widgets. You have two choices: don’t take the deal or make your company 100% reliant on Apple.

100%. While diversifying is ideal many small businesses operate like this. That 50 million widget order might be the difference between scaling into a company that has budget to grow more consistently in the future or whether you continue in scarcity mode.

I understand it's just an example, but going from 500 to 50 million is enough to break your business if you're not paying attention to cash flow and invest too soon in production means.

B2B is not B2C. It's easy for Google to have multiple equivalent customers with their mass market software. When you're making specialized hardware, not so much.

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