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Splitting Up With Apple is a Chipmaker's Nightmare (engadget.com)
Apple is such a powerful company that, for third-party suppliers, it's hard not to become reliant on the cash that it pays you. Engadget adds: But when Apple says that it's done, choosing to move whatever technology you provide in house, the results can be really painful. Imagination Technologies is one such supplier, famously designing the iPhone's PowerVR graphics as well as pushing MIPS, a rival to ARM. But back in March, Imagination publicly announced that Apple was ditching it in favor of its own graphics silicon. Now, Imagination has revealed that it's going to take Apple to dispute resolution, maintaining that the iPhone maker used Imagination's IP without permission. It's the second chipmaker in recent months who believes Apple isn't playing fair, with Qualcomm counter-suing Apple in its own licensing dispute. Secondly, Imagination is going to have to sell off MIPS and Ensigma, two parts of its business that aren't as profitable as PowerVR. Gamers with long memories will remember that MIPS designed the CPUs that lurked inside the PlayStation, PS2 and Nintendo 64.
Timmy is back and this time he's angry.
I'm not liking Apple right now. Destroying several companies in their quest to gain more cash.
Its pretty much impossible to build a modern GPU without infringing on the patents of one of the existing players. Even Intel is stuck paying licensing fees from AMD or nVidia, its hard to see how Apple won't have to do the same.
They seem to be under the illusion that Apple needs to play fair. If you have 250 billion dollars you get to make the rules.
And at least make it competitive with ARM again. It's too good of an architecture to just let die.
Unless they take the lid off Apples new graphics chip and can point out hardware design similarities and possibly extract the microcode. However doing so would violate apples copyright so they could counter sue.
As usual, only the lawyers will win.
For Qualcomm and Imagination, I would think that their contracts with Apple were pretty iron-clad. Apple didn't become one of the biggest companies on the planet by signing deals that wasn't in their favour. Potential for abuse by Apple when the contracts were drawn up aside, I would think that the contracts are pretty solid and Apple knows exactly what it's rights are and has protected itself.
This means that the only recourse for (former) suppliers is to go after Apple, primarily in the court of public opinion, to see if there's a chance for a settlement to avoid Apple's public reputation being damaged. Although after Jobs, I don't see how it could get any worse on that front.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
This is one of the oldest tricks in the business book.
Get a vendor to supply OVER 35% of their entire business to you alone, then cut them off (or demand massive reductions in price) and when they falter because of the drop in revenue, you either purchase them outright for a song, or scoop up their IP when they go out of business due to Bankruptcy.
Wal*Mart is famous for doing this, so was Sears back when they had non-insane management.
I worked for a company that flat-out refused business from Sears if it exceeded more than 35% of their total income for this reason.
Many years after I left them new management discarded that idea, and lo and behold within 5 years they went bankrupt when a customer demanded a 85% reduction in prices, then let them die and bought up their IP out of Bankruptcy Court for a song and moved all manufacturing to Guatemala.
Imagination Technologies should have seen this coming.
I've got a couple of Zgemma Linux-based satellite TV set-top boxes and they use a MIPS chip, so it's not just used in ancient game consoles. The boxes are very nice to tinker with (Web interface, ssh, loads of pre-built plugins) and I'll put in a good word for Wooshbuild - a firmware image that makes the box interface look like S*y HD or S*y Q.
And that would be the reason my father told me never to let one client dedicate more than 30% of my business. It's also why I told my father that reliable clients sometimes get heavy discounts, to offset the lack of sales/collection efforts, which keeps them from rolling their own.
Maybe Tim Cook is not a sufficiently capable CEO.
Steve Jobs's worst decision was promoting Tim Cook (Nov 2, 2016) "Quote: Why Tim Cook is the new Steve Ballmer".
Remove Tim Cook as CEO of Apple. (Oct 31, 2016) Quote: "Many products are announced in one quarter and released in another quarter."
Why is /. broken?
https://slashdot.org/
First story: Splitting Up With Apple is a Chipmaker's Nightmare
https://slashdot.org/?page=1
First story: Splitting Up With Apple is a Chipmaker's Nightmare
What about Silicon Graphics machines? I find it odd the article doesn't even mention SGI. I still have an O2 R12K, an Octane 2 R14K, and an Indigo 2 Impact R10K.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Between Apple and these billion dollar companies Apple's business has created, my only reaction to this is... why is the taxpayer wasting money and resources on resolving these lawsuits? They should work out their differences in private mediation.
For Qualcomm and Imagination, I would think that their contracts with Apple were pretty iron-clad. Apple didn't become one of the biggest companies on the planet by signing deals that wasn't in their favour. Potential for abuse by Apple when the contracts were drawn up aside, I would think that the contracts are pretty solid and Apple knows exactly what it's rights are and has protected itself.
This means that the only recourse for (former) suppliers is to go after Apple, primarily in the court of public opinion, to see if there's a chance for a settlement to avoid Apple's public reputation being damaged. Although after Jobs, I don't see how it could get any worse on that front.
Um, this is the company that ended up with its most important parts supplier becoming its biggest competitor. They are still trying to detach themselves from Samsung, and despite having $1/4 trillion in the bank cannot get hold of the best displays in the industry.
Given that Mr Cook was in charge of all this supply chain stuff before being anointed by Jobs, why would you assume their other supply arrangements were put together any better?
It's playing just for Imagination.
Hopefully, as more of these patents expire, a Vulcan based open source GPU will emerge.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Imagination doesn't make chips, so no, they didn't sell Apple chips, and Imagination hasn't yet giving Apple permission to use their technology (going forward, that is, since Apple has said it won't be paying for it). Really, the whole situation bears no resemblance to the Qualcomm case in the slightest.
At play here is that Imagination has, up to now, licensed their technologies to Apple, which Apple has used in its custom-designed chips for a few years. Apple is now claiming that their custom designs no longer rely on Imagination's technology, so they're going to stop paying. Imagination is understandably asking how that's even possible, given that the new chips presumably work the same as the old ones, which means that they likely rely on Imagination's tech.
At no point did Imagination "sell" their technology to Apple, other than as part of a licensing agreement that was contingent on continued royalty payments. So, yes, they get to have a say in how Apple uses their technology, assuming, of course, that Apple is actually still using their technology.
It's pretty sad that poor management and "economics" killed so many nice things.
Also Alpha, PARISC, and so on. Yes, you could try and find them second hand (not around here, though), but it'd be nice to see what any of them might've become with modern process and continuous development effort in the meantime. There's still POWER but it's made out of IBMium, which is an amalgam of at least unobtanium and unaffordium, and possibly SPARC, made out of much the same with a good dose of up close and personal totalassholium in the mix. For the rest there's just AMD64 (bwahahahaha itanic bwahahahaha but the whole is still a sorry state of tragic sadness) and your pick of irremovable backdoor, AMT or PSP.
At play here is that Imagination has, up to now, licensed their technologies to Apple, which Apple has used in its custom-designed chips for a few years. Apple is now claiming that their custom designs no longer rely on Imagination's technology, so they're going to stop paying. Imagination is understandably asking how that's even possible, given that the new chips presumably work the same as the old ones, which means that they likely rely on Imagination's tech.
In the arena of mobile GPUs, Imagination certainly isn't the only company so it's not like they are the only choice. Qualcomm makes their own proprietary GPU. nVidia and ARM also offer designs to be licensed. I would think Apple may rely on their architectural license with ARM and leverage that into designing a Mali based GPU. But let's see the details.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
As always: Fuck Apple!
When you build your company based on income mainly from one giant customer, you are eventually going to lose.
famously to Vlassic Pickle. when you buy them these days it's a different company that bought the brand when it went under. The scam is you go to a company, give them a huge contract, they borrow a bunch of money to buy equipment to meet demand and then you leverage that by threatening to break the agreement. The bigger company might be breaking a contract but by the time that gets hashed out in court the smaller one is going to be bankrupt...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There's a reason that nVidia and AMD both suddenly implemented tile based renderers,
Actually, Nvidia has had their own TBR patents for quite some time :
- Nvidia bought up 3DFx for their patents and their engineer back when that one went bankrupt.
- Before that, 3DFx had bought up Gigapixel, among other for their TBR patents, to be used in future product (forgot the code name) - and HSR (hidden surface removal) tech to be applied much earlier in then current product (in the then VSA-100 / Voodoo4/5/6 and in the upcoming Rampage / Spectre)
So Nvidia indirectly acquired TBR patents.
Though for the record, they were more interested in the know-how and engineer which where working on the Rampage GPU ("3DFx Spectre" cards) due to programmable pixel shaders being all the rage, and retained them to work on GeForce FX (speculation backthen that probably the pun in the name was intended... )
So in theory, they could have moved into the field much faster than ATI / AMD.
(But back at the Rampage / GeForce FX era, there where some area were TBR was problamatic : e.g. some transparency (i.e.: simple alpha-blend, back then) couldn't be handled in a single pass easily. So probably they decided not to bother.
Given that modern games work with tons of subsequent passes (transparent materials cause diffraction/distortion in a separate pass of a pixel-shader), I would suspect that it's not that much a problem anymore).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Hopefully, as more of these patents expire, a Vulcan based open source GPU will emerge.
As the numerous past failures of attempts at opensource GPU or even opensource graphic cards have shown, making a functional and competitive graphic card is EXTREMELY difficult.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The parent post mentions SGI iron.
but also let's not forget multitude of routing equipment (CISCO was/is a big user of MIPS processors).
Also, the Chinese have developed MIPS processors for use in anything from laptops to SuperComputers... (Loongson/Godson).
MIPS cores are also used in many cheapo routers/modems
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
What is rumoured is that apple developed pretty much their whole graphics core, very different from imagination's, while the front end and some fixed functions are still imagination's IP. Either they are sure that by the time of implementation those will be developed IP free as well, or not encumbered by patetnts anymore.
Of course engineers and lawyers are fallibe, and if Imagination surveys the graphics core with a fine enough comb, they may find some nuggets of their IP there. Or be a pebble in the shoe of apple in order to get some monies...
But in the end, if push comes to shove, Apple can either settle with Imagination out of court, or buy Vivante technologies for what (for apple) is pocket lint/change, getting pattent protection in the operation.
whichever is cheaper.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
Ignoring the piles of cash Cook has made. Tim Cook does not wear turtleneck shirts. Therefor he is not qualified to be CEO of Apple.
Exactly, "magical pipeline" is something Steve Jobs would never have done.
There is an explanation in the article to which I linked, with this quote: "Why Tim Cook is the new Steve Ballmer".
I'm searching for some depth of understanding.
"You've made nothing original" - by Brockmire ( 4931623 ) on Monday May 01, 2017 @07:34PM (#54337699)
You've made NOTHING - prove otherwise FAKE NAME for your FAKE LIFE!
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"You did not come up with the idea of a hosts file" - by Brockmire ( 4931623 ) on Monday May 01, 2017 @07:34PM (#54337699)
Did I say I did? No.
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"You are not the first to use the hosts file" - by Brockmire ( 4931623 ) on Monday May 01, 2017 @07:34PM (#54337699)
Did I say I was?? Again, no.
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"You are not even the first person to aggregate block lists into a single block list" - by Brockmire ( 4931623 ) on Monday May 01, 2017 @07:34PM (#54337699)
Did I say I was??? Yet again, no.
APK
P.S.=> I only said mine's better & it's no mere 'script' you SCRIPT KIDDIE "ne'er-do-well" do nothing zero:
"thousands who've made scripts to do this already" - by Brockmire ( 4931623 ) on Monday May 01, 2017 @07:34PM (#54337699)
They used prebuilt scripting tools that do the it vs. the fact that I wrote literally the equivalent of 14 UNIX commands into an EASY TO USE GUI multithreaded SINGLE .exe program to do it, & do it better vs. my competitors (have you? Oh HELL no)... apk
It doesn't answer the question. Maybe only 108 people knew about the petition.