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.

Comments

Re:Going for a settlement with Apple?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had the misfortune of dealing with Apple on the business side, and they just make stuff up as they go along. They will make all manner of completely unreasonable demands, which have nothing at all to do with the contract, and just threaten to rip up said contract if they don't get what they want. Not to mention they will get a bug up their ass about enforcing one part of the contract one week, then the next week they couldn't care less about that, but this other minor inconsequential provision is now crucial, and they'll club you over the head with the threat of ripping up the contract if you don't comply. They'll claim they have "statistics" or some such that shows you aren't in line with other similar companies, but you'll never actually get to SEE the evidence, because it's confidential or some other nonsense. You'll be assigned an Apple minder, who will typically be completely unavailable if you try calling/emailing them, but will miraculously find time in their busy schedule if it's to call/email you about something you're not doing right. Some of their mid to upper level managers will even be verbally abusive if you have face to face meetings, and they'll even ambush you. They'll invite you to Cupertino, saying it's a friendly little junket to tour the Apple facilities, except you'll be ushered into a conference room where a number of execs will accuse you of a bunch of things.

Essentially, Apple's M.O. is to just threaten to rip up your contract if you don't drop trou, bend over, and take a good ass pounding whenever they feel like giving you one. The little bits you see in stories like this don't even represent the tip of the iceberg, they're like the dusting of snow on the iceberg's surface.

Nvidia and Tile Renderer

[DrYak]

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).