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Comment by person_of_color | Hacker News Reader

Why would IMGT rely on a single customer?

Dodgy business practices.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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