“Apple has been quietly working behind the scenes to create its own GPU,” Fudzilla reports.
“Rome hasn’t been built in a day and it sure takes at least a few years to create a fully functional mobile GPU,” Fudzilla reports. “This is why Apple has been working under extreme secrecy for a few years, according to Fudzilla’s Deep Throats in the graphics industry… Apple is making its GPU to cut the cord from Imagination Technologies a company that makes its IP (Intellectual Property) for the GPU.”
“Having its own GPU would help Apple to compete better in the phone and tablet market. Of course it is unlikely to drop any price, it will just mean its huge margins will get bigger,” Fudzilla reports. “We would expect to see Apple SoC with a custom CPU and custom in house GPU sooner rather than later. One more thing, we are quite sure that Apple is not developing its in house LTE / 4G modem, it has already given the work to Intel for the future iPhone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Healthy margins means innovative, best-in-class products.
If they bother to do this. They should also make a physics processing unit. I would make that one on the MB and firmware update-able.
Apple co-owns Imaginative Technologies. I am not sure it would make sense for Apple to develop their own graphics.
Imagination Technologies market cap is only 0.5B GBP so Apple could easily buy them. After all thats how they acquired they capability in chip design.
Apple knows & surely analyzed whether they could buy Im. Tech., but the questions were likely not only whether the shareholders would sell, but would the core engineering team had all the skills Apple wanted and whether they would stay with Apple.
I’d guess that the issue is even deeper than that. Imagination would be a pittance to purchase costwise, but it might come with much bigger headaches. If every company that uses ARM basically licenses the tech from Imagination (I think this is the case), Apple would either need to continue to license designs to the rest of the industry or it could be seen as being anti-competitive if it shut that business down and took it entirely in-house. Both would be awful outcomes so it’s unlikely Apple would buy Imagination even if it otherwise might make sense to do it. My two cents at least and largely based on guesswork.
They’re never going to do this on Macs because it would probably require companies to recompile their software for the Apple GPU.
Recompiling is nothing. It takes just a few minutes to recompile an application (I’ve been doing it for years). It’s all about the graphics library: part of the Xcode SDK. It’s got enough brains to run the proper code for the GPU without any intervention from the programmer. My code runs on Minis, Cheesegraters, Trash Cans, MacBooks, etc without any special attention from me. 10.6.8 up to El Cap.
Of course a developer may wish to dig deeper and run special code that’s only on a particular graphics card. The decision to do that is based on a cost-benefit analysis. It would require specialty programming. But recompilation isn’t necessarily a problem at all.
Keep in mind that Apple has no interest in making a new Mac/phone/pad undesirable just because a favorite app won’t run on it. That may be unavoidable for various reasons, but start with the assumption that they want it to go smoothly.
Never stopped Apple before: 6800, PowerPC , Intel. Apple is not afraid of change.
Lookup: LLVM, OpenCL
Healthy margins means innovative, best-in-class products.
really?
that didn’t seem to work for ballmer and microsoft….. so perhaps we should not take that as a universal statement.
remember, hubris pays no rewards.
I don’t think a GPU will help them compete better because that would imply that there currently is any competition.
No harm in widening the gap though.
For those of you who are from an AFZ the use of GPU in this article means Graphics Processing Unit, and not Glorious Pubic Underwear, and SoC means System on a Chip and not Sucker of Coke.
“according to Fudzilla’s Deep Throats in the graphics industry…”
Fudzilla’s Deep Throats…..FUD for sure.
WWDC 2016: New GPU with Metal technology, suddenly Gabe Newell takes the stage announcing Half-life 3 for the Mac exclusive. Wouldn’t that be a burn for the gaming community
great article