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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

AMD does not license to third parties, neither does Intel. Options (ignoring acquisition and design from scratch) are:

* NVidia's Tegra graphics cores, possibly (not clear whether they block-license let alone architecture-license to third parties)

* ARM's Mali, definitely licensable

* Broadcom's VideoCore, possibly

* Vivante, definitely licensable

* Qualcomm's Adreno, formerly Imageon, unlikely

Also note that at least two dozen Imagination employees left for Apple between 2015 and 2016 http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/10/13/apple-poaching-gpu...

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I have a theory that when you're the size of Apple, new licensing opportunities will open up.

>AMD does not license to third parties, neither does Intel.

If the money was right, they would. Apple is not a random third party. Heck, it could buy AMD with a year's spare change.

AMD did, however, sell Adreno to Qualcomm when money was tight after the ATI purchase.

And looking back it wasn't a smart decision. Adreno=Radeon

Along with the other things they sold that don't seem so smart now. Like abandoning the low power x86 Geode processor in 2009. Interestingly, according to this article [1] they sold Adreno for only $65 million, less than IT is making from Apple each year in royalties.

https://www.xda-developers.com/a-look-back-at-amds-history-a...

That may be true but unlike Adreno, you know Apple does not resell any of the patents to anyone else, so it always stay contained to Apple's products. Given how much revenue they can take, it's a very tempting business agreement.

I was under the impression all the big modern consoles were using customized AMD GPUs. For example, according to the PS4's Wikipedia entry [0], its GPU is a "Semi-custom AMD GCN Radeon (integrated into APU)". Are those customizations made by AMD for Sony, instead of licensing the technology?

I found an article claiming Intel is licensing AMD GPU technology [1]. If that's the case, would it be surprising to see Apple do the same?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4

[1] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4042977-new-details-intels-...

Yes, those customizations are made by AMD. They aren't even very custom, fail0verflow have managed to run a lightly modified linux kernel with the open-source AMD drivers on PS4 hardware with full graphics acceleration[0].

[0] https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2016/console-hacking-2016-post...

As far as I know this are more or less custom configurations of the same CPU i.e. how many CPU/GPU cores, how much cache etc.

> Are those customizations made by AMD for Sony

Yes, same for the Xbox One, they both use APU customised by AMD.

AMD does license to third parties, at least for x86:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/227059-amd-announces-n...

Nvidia's Tegra is key to their mobile compute efforts. There is no way they are going to license it to anybody. They would sell Apple the chip... maybe. But they would want Apple to buy into their whole stack, which Apple isn't going to want either.

As near as I can tell, the CPU in Tegra chips are just vanilla core designs that Nvidia licenses from ARM. The secret sauce is the GPU. Given enough money I think Nvidia would license their GPU designs to Apple as it would expand the reach of CUDA and make it more of an industry standard.

As far as the CPU cores go, yes, there isn't much to distinguish them there.

There is no way in the foreseeable future that Nvidia will license their GPU designs to anybody.

The only way you'll see Nvidia IP on an Apple box is if Nvidia-made chips are in there, but Nvidia will require buy in on the rest of their software stack. But Apple won't want to cede that much control of their platform to Nvidia.

Nvidia already had tremendous reach, they don't need Apple.

Hold up. I thought AMD was actively courting third parties to partner with to do mixed IP development (wrt graphics and GP GPU compute) and that licensing restrictions that they had were almost entirely related to the x86 side of their business.

I remember rumblings about that some years ago (circa 2010~2012), but I don't remember anything ever coming of it.

Only 3 of those provide high-end ip.

  * NVidia Tegra - possible
  * ARM Mali - possible, but would not allow for much differentiation
  * Qualcomm - has never sold its GPU IP seperately

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