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Comment by jordskott | Hacker News Reader

No, I can say with certainty that they are working on their own mobile GPU.

They have been hiring a lot of graphics people and putting a team together.

And another thing that most people are not really aware: Apple had a lot of saying in the architectural and design decisions of Imagination's GPUs that ended up on their iPhones. A good part of the development actually happened at Apple's offices with Imagination people flying over.

So they know what they are doing, they are very well familiar with Imagination's GPU and they are more than capable of developing their own thing from scratch.

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> Apple had a lot of saying in the architectural and design decisions of Imagination's GPUs that ended up on their iPhones. A good part of the development actually happened at Apple's offices with Imagination people flying over.

So that's why Imagination is insisting Apple can't not infringe: they know Apple won't have a cleanroom implementation not using the guys who've talked to Imagination.

Apple have a classic "they saw the copyrighted sourcecode" problem on their hands.

Not really, you seriously think Apple would just let ImgTech guys come in without lawyers and agreements and all of that sort? Apple has extensive experience in this area, they had ImgTech signed everything possible to protect Apple and to indemnify themselves. It is a risk that ImgTech also took by allowing Apple deeper into the development process. This isn't a one-way street here.

Apple is extremely potent in protecting its technologies. There is no way they just let random ImgTech fly in and work on stuff with them without any agreements in advance. If this happened, ImgTech is going to be an easy billionaire by the end of the lawsuits they could do.

While I have no doubt that Apple works closely with their hardware partners by flying their engineers in to work on projects, I seriously doubt it was as simple as the OP made it sound.

It actually is as simple as the OP said.

That was the main reason why Apple went for Imagination instead of ARM or Qualcomm when it comes to mobile GPUs.

Imagination market cap has been falling hard in the latest years, so hard to the point that their only customer until now was Apple. They were desperate and they signed very risky deals in order to keep Apple as a customer.

And Apple is a complete control freak when it comes to their products, the idea of not being able to control the stuff they put on their products is unthinkable to them.

So Imagination signed a bunch of architectural deals (instead of purely implementation deals) because that was the real product Apple was looking for.

Don't let yourself be mistaken, this whole situation is far from a surprise to Imagination. They knew this day would come, they were just trying to cling on to the little market they could find until they found another deal in order to stay afloat.

I'm not sure where we crossed wires but we're saying the same thing, nothing you said changed what I said.

What I meant by OP is that it is not as simple as flying their partners in and they start working together and then leave. Apple doesn't just do that without ensuring everything that happens stays in Apple only. So, flying ImgTech guys in and out does not mean ImgTech owns the patents to what they did at Apple want or the other way around, Apple can ensure they have the exclusive rights to it.

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