Apple Mends Fences with Long-term iPhone GPU Maker Imagination Technology

A little over two years ago, Apple parted ways with Imagination Technologies, the company that had for years been the sole supplier of GPUs for all of Apple’s mobile and media devices, including the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Apple TV, and Apple Watch.

While Apple’s Macs naturally used more traditional GPUs from vendors such as Nvidia and later AMD, the company’s A-series powered devices had a completely different architecture with fundamentally different requirements, leading them to partner with Imagination many years ago to supply its PowerVR GPU architecture to Apple for integration with its A-series system-on-a-chip (SoC).

Although the move sparked an oddball conspiracy theory that Apple was actually just planning to devalue Imagination so that it could gobble it up at a bargain — Imagination’s stock price plummeted by 70% after the news was announced — it’s hard to see how Apple would need to make such a Machiavellian move just to save a few million bucks — or what literally amounts to pocket change for a company with over $200 billion cash sitting in the bank.

It was far more likely that Apple was taking its usual approach of bringing more of its chip-manufacturing efforts back in-house in order to gain more control over the design of its hardware — something that the company has repeatedly done before. It’s the whole reason the A-series chip exists in the first place, and why everything else from the Apple Watch to the AirPods are also powered by chips custom-designed by Apple.

Unfortunately, the parting between the two companies wasn’t entirely amicable, as Imagination raised concerns that Apple would not be able to develop its own GPU architecture without violating Imagination’s own “confidential information” which the iPhone maker had assimilate over the years, as the two companies had worked together closely since 2006.

In short, Imagination believed it was virtually impossible for Apple to “forget” what it had learned from working with Imagination for so long. Imagination reached out to Apple looking for assurances of this, but after failing to receive a satisfactory answer, began a dispute resolution process requesting that Apple make an “alternative commercial arrangement for the current license and royalty agreement,” meaning that since Apple couldn’t convince Imagination that it could move forward without infringing on its patents, it wanted Apple to agree to pay it at least some royalties for anything that it developed on its own even if it wasn’t using Imagination’s specific implementation.

Meanwhile, Apple continued to mostly ignore Imagination’s concerns, forging ahead with its own GPU design that it incorporated into its A11 chip for the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X in 2018, while also poaching a few of Imagination’s engineers along that way.

Although the process seems to have brought Imagination Technologies to the brink of collapse — it relied on Apple for half of its revenue and was forced to put itself up for sale in June 2017, being later acquired by a Chinese-funded private equity firm — it seems that with the dawn of a new decade there has now come a reconciliation between the two companies, with the broken friendship having been repaired in the form of a new “multi-year license agreement” that makes it seem that Imagination finally got what it was asking for from Apple after all.

Apple has been quiet on the matter thus far, so the only announcement we’ve heard has come from a brief statement on Imagination’s website, where it simply states that it’s ”replaced the multi-year, multi-use license agreement with Apple, first announced on February 6, 2014, with a new multi-year license agreement under which Apple has access to a wider range of Imagination’s intellectual property in exchange for license fees.”

Since we don’t have much to go on beyond Imagination’s own statement, it’s hard to say what prompted this sudden change of heart on Apple’s part. The iPhone maker didn’t seem to be struggling significantly to produce its own GPUs — in many ways its A11, A12, and A13 chips are big leaps forward, in fact. However, once Imagination recovered from its losses, it also began aggressively developing its own GPU designs again, recently announcing the IMG A-Series GPU that it claims is the faster GPU to date.

Imagination plans to market new SoCs incorporating the new GPU this year, so it’s easy to see how Apple may have now decided that it wants a piece of that action for its next-generation A-series chips, and with the AR headset that’s supposed to land by 2022 and the rumours of Apple developing its own ARM-based Mac SoCs, there’s a lot of incentive for it to make sure it nails down the best technology it can as soon as possible.