“Apple has become probably the finest mobile silicon powerhouse,” Ashraf Eassa writes for The Motley Fool. “Its mobile chips, found in the iPhone/iPad product lines, are world class thanks to a combination of very skilled in-house IP development teams, strong integration teams, and an ability to get things out on-time and on-target. Although if you really think about it, who knows the needs and requirements of the world’s best mobile devices better than the maker of those devices?”
“It has been no secret that for quite some time, Apple has been hiring GPU experts/designers/micro-architects, and it is likely that Apple is working on its own in-house GPUs (at least to see what it can do),” Eassa writes. “However, Imagination Technologies – Apple’s GPU supplier from the very beginning – recently went ahead and announced that Apple had signed with it a multi-year licensing agreement for both its GPU and video cores . So, it’s clear that Apple plans to stick with Imagination for quite some time.”
“What’s going on here? Well, the long-and-the-short of it is, Imagination has many years of experience developing low power/high performance GPU IP that is well suited for the mobile markets,” Eassa writes. “Indeed, just look at the performance of the Imagination PowerVR G6430 inside of the 4″ slim iPhone 5s against the performance of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 inside of a 5″+ Nexus 5 phone and an NVIDIA Tegra 4 inside of a 7″ tablet.”
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