“Imagine you were the company which invented the PC, revolutionized the smartphone and created the tablet industry,” Jonny Evans reports for Computerworld. “What would you do to hurt your imitative competitors? According to AppleInsider, Apple has a nuclear option: producing mobile devices 20 times more powerful than any it has made before.”
“For once, this news isn’t driven by the usual bouncing rubber-clad but insubstantial Digitimes speculation: It comes directly from Imagination Technologies, who announced its next-gen PowerVR Series6 GPU core family earlier this week,” Evans reports. “These processors could wend their way inside Apple’s devices, delivering performance up to 20 times more than the current generation.”
Evans reports, “This fits well with the trajectory of Apple’s Post-PC plan — the performance difference between a mobile device and a plain old PC will continue to evaporate… That suggests the analysts at IDC and Gartner will soon be forced to follow the lead of Canalys, and begin to count tablet sales as PCs. (In future, even smartphone sales may be counted as these as the performance difference evaporates.)”
There’s much more in the full article here.
Related articles:
U.S. Windows PC shipments drop 6% in holiday quarter as Apple Macs surge 21% – January 11, 2012
J.P. Morgan: Apple’s MacBook Air to dominate ultrabook market – December 12, 2011
Why Apple will be the world’s #1 personal computer maker in 2012 – December 5, 2011
Apple on track to overtake HP, become leading global PC vendor – November 21, 2011
Gartner: Apple Mac share up 20% in Europe YOY as PC shipments plunge 11.4% – November 14, 2011
Surging iPad shipments propel Apple to #1 in worldwide mobile computer market share – February 16, 2011
Canalys unafraid to count iPad, puts Apple third in worldwide PC market share – January 26, 2011
DisplaySearch not afraid to count iPad: Apple #1 mobile PC maker in North America, #3 in world – December 7, 2010
But…but…Apple is a customer of Imagination Tech, so it’s not as though they have exclusive rights.
….unless they buy them?
You gotta do something with $90B, surely.
I’m pretty sure Apple owns 10% of them.
This is why any TOST analysis of AAPL worth its salt will view the edge of its innovation in nanotechnology. It’s what AAPL’s doing at the very smallest scale that drives their biggest products and profits.
The same was true of SNE. Miniaturization created their walkman and their Bravia. SNE lost the “small war” to INTC and AAPL. AAPL now leads the war in tiny, and thus leads the industry.
Interesting to note the confluence of smallness, power, price and industry prominence of AAPL on a TART graph.
Anyone following Squiggles constant SHARTS can clearly see the man loves him some acronyms.
I saw this coming when Steve introduced the first iPhone.
Congratulations on your brilliance.
The worse part is that the last that Imagination Technologies said thier GPU was 5 times faster, at the end, it was 9 times faster.
PC guys and cloners are used to hear a performance promise and have less than half of what it was promised.
It is great to be a PC guy or a Apple’s cloner, you don’t really have to develop things, you just have to promise them and make a bad copy of what apple does.
The real key to future performance improvements isn’t in chip technology, it’s in battery/power technology. The faster mobile power sources can be developed to be smaller and contain more power longer, the easier it will be to improve performance because you won’t have to worry about power consumption so much.
As we have seen from Android 4G phones, speed/chipset doesn’t matter if the phone dies after 3-4 hours of use.
Just think about the nonesense:
Imagination Tech will produce in 2012 a GPU 20x the performance of A5 at same power.
I call bullshit!
MDN is transforming rapidly into a tabloid junk.
Did you read what you wrote before posting? Nobody said the GPU was 20x faster than an A5, it’s 20x faster than its predecessor that is built into the A5 chip. You seem to be mixing up GPU and CPU. The A5 isn’t made by IT, it’s made by ARM, in England.
Apple paid ARM to be an ARM chip developer. Apple designed the A5 using some ARM technology and some of Apple’s newly acquired technology.
Whatever CPU fab company, that Apple isn’t pissed off at currently, builds or fabricates the A5 chip. The A5 chip has both a CPU, Central Processing Unit, and a GPU, Graphics Processing Unit on board.
The A5 is a SOC or System on a Chip.
@Rorschach
Poor silly girl, so much nonsense, so much disinformation, so much wishful thinking, you are a true fangirl.
I’m afraid it’s your statements that are nonsense/disinformation/wishful thinking.
As I understand it, A5 uses a single-core IT GPU. IT just announced a quad-core GPU with each core being 5x the performance. Some things don’t scale linearly, but most graphics do.
And you are a true idiot.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/18/imagination-technologies-unveils-series-6-powervr-gpus-promis/
They actually said that the Rogue Series GPU’s (which YOU are mixing with *CPUs*) would be 20x better LAST YEAR. They said it in their fucking PRESS RELEASE it would process 210 GFLOPS, and that it would make its way to tablets and smartphones THIS YEAR.
So please, SHUT THE FUCK UP.
SSSBBS :: Scorned Sensitive Stupid Blond British Slut,
There is no imgtec chip in iP 4S: pleeeese check BOM.
Intel has 2x more shares in imgtec then Apple.
Hey, truly, everyone who even conceders a possibility of next iPhone to have 20x performance of iP 4S is a complete idiot … and you can find them on MDN comment section in droves, hehehe, really amusing to see so many revealed.
The issues/ improvements that I want for my iPhone really revolve around speed of data. I don’t need my phone to do a ton of processing, I need my 3g to be quick and reliable.
I want to be able to walk down the street and have Siri call my husband without apologizing three times first, because the network sucks. Not sure what Apple can do in this area, but it is the biggest flaw with any mobile technology.
Wrong. You want your phone to do a ton of processing locally so that it does not have to rely on unreliable connections to do it remotely.
And you don’t need GPU but CPU power for this kind of processing.
And apple can solve it if thay use more powerful CPU. … which noone at present can do … Just wait 2-3 years at least.
Sounds great so long as they all get slimmer and lighter at the same time. The iPad is way too heavy as it is.
I once sent Apple a feedback suggestion telling them to make an iPhone that could connect to and drive a computer monitor and where you could plug in a keyboard and mouse and you would then use the iPhone as a computer CPU. I believe someday this will be common…
No matter what!!!! AAPL is heading Up Up Up 🙂
2012 = $555
2013 = $656
2014 = $757
2015 = $858 🙂 Any questions? Buy!
I just LOVE it when these guys talk about the “evaporating” performance difference between desktops and tablets/phones. (full sarcasm intended!)
Yes, the gap is getting smaller. However, these guys imply (as many, many do these days) that the gap is going to evaporate completely in the next 5 to 10 years.
That is NOT going to happen.
Yes, within 10 years the tablet System on Chip designs will rival or be better than the desktops of today. Yet these prognosticators seem to forget that (using Intel’s chips as a reference) today’s Sandy Bridge is slower than the Ivy Bridge that will come out in a few months. Ivy Bridge will be slower than its replacement, Haswell. Haswell will be slower than Broadwell. Similarly Broadwell will be slower than Skylake which will be slower than Skymont… and so forth.
Yes, the gap between the then AX chip and the top performing Skymont chip will be narrower than between the A5 and the top performing Sandy Bridge chip of today, but there will still be a gap. The AX chip will not have the same performance as the top chip of the Skymont set.
We all know the gap will eventually evaporate 100%. It’s just that anyone expecting it to evaporate 100% before about 2025 is not living in the real world.
I agree. It will be a long time before a lighter, smaller mobile device like the iPad will fully catch up to a heavier, higher power device (of a comparable technological generation) like an iMac or even a MacBook Pro. The reason is power. When you can throw tens of Watts, or even 100+W at a CPU, then you can add more pipelines and raise the clock speed to increase performance. You also have enough power to run fans to cool the beast.
Eventually power may be of such minimal concern that tiny devices will have incredible computing power as well as long run time without recharging. Just look at the iPod, iPhone and iPad compared to regular desktops and laptops of ten to fifteen years ago – truly incredible progress. And the MBA is demonstrating that the performance gap can be bridged to some degree, providing the best of both worlds. Given some time, the computing dreams of today will become reality some day.
Although it will never evaporate, the perception of the speed difference for 99% of what people do will evaporate. For the most part, I can browser web pages, write documents, email etc. on a four year old MacBook as fast as my year old Mac pro. Desktops have reached a point where most people do not need more speed for most of their activities. In a few years, the tablets/iPad will be at that same level, so most people will have the perception that there is no difference.
This.