AMD does not license to third parties, neither does Intel. Options (ignoring acquisition and design from scratch) are:

* NVidia's Tegra graphics cores, possibly (not clear whether they block-license let alone architecture-license to third parties)

* ARM's Mali, definitely licensable

* Broadcom's VideoCore, possibly

* Vivante, definitely licensable

* Qualcomm's Adreno, formerly Imageon, unlikely

Also note that at least two dozen Imagination employees left for Apple between 2015 and 2016 http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/10/13/apple-poaching-gpu...

I have a theory that when you're the size of Apple, new licensing opportunities will open up.

>AMD does not license to third parties, neither does Intel.

If the money was right, they would. Apple is not a random third party. Heck, it could buy AMD with a year's spare change.

AMD did, however, sell Adreno to Qualcomm when money was tight after the ATI purchase.

And looking back it wasn't a smart decision. Adreno=Radeon

Along with the other things they sold that don't seem so smart now. Like abandoning the low power x86 Geode processor in 2009. Interestingly, according to this article [1] they sold Adreno for only $65 million, less than IT is making from Apple each year in royalties.

https://www.xda-developers.com/a-look-back-at-amds-history-a...

That may be true but unlike Adreno, you know Apple does not resell any of the patents to anyone else, so it always stay contained to Apple's products. Given how much revenue they can take, it's a very tempting business agreement.

I was under the impression all the big modern consoles were using customized AMD GPUs. For example, according to the PS4's Wikipedia entry [0], its GPU is a "Semi-custom AMD GCN Radeon (integrated into APU)". Are those customizations made by AMD for Sony, instead of licensing the technology?

I found an article claiming Intel is licensing AMD GPU technology [1]. If that's the case, would it be surprising to see Apple do the same?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4

[1] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4042977-new-details-intels-...

Yes, those customizations are made by AMD. They aren't even very custom, fail0verflow have managed to run a lightly modified linux kernel with the open-source AMD drivers on PS4 hardware with full graphics acceleration[0].

[0] https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2016/console-hacking-2016-post...

As far as I know this are more or less custom configurations of the same CPU i.e. how many CPU/GPU cores, how much cache etc.

> Are those customizations made by AMD for Sony

Yes, same for the Xbox One, they both use APU customised by AMD.

AMD does license to third parties, at least for x86:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/227059-amd-announces-n...

Nvidia's Tegra is key to their mobile compute efforts. There is no way they are going to license it to anybody. They would sell Apple the chip... maybe. But they would want Apple to buy into their whole stack, which Apple isn't going to want either.

As near as I can tell, the CPU in Tegra chips are just vanilla core designs that Nvidia licenses from ARM. The secret sauce is the GPU. Given enough money I think Nvidia would license their GPU designs to Apple as it would expand the reach of CUDA and make it more of an industry standard.

As far as the CPU cores go, yes, there isn't much to distinguish them there.

There is no way in the foreseeable future that Nvidia will license their GPU designs to anybody.

The only way you'll see Nvidia IP on an Apple box is if Nvidia-made chips are in there, but Nvidia will require buy in on the rest of their software stack. But Apple won't want to cede that much control of their platform to Nvidia.

Nvidia already had tremendous reach, they don't need Apple.

Hold up. I thought AMD was actively courting third parties to partner with to do mixed IP development (wrt graphics and GP GPU compute) and that licensing restrictions that they had were almost entirely related to the x86 side of their business.

I remember rumblings about that some years ago (circa 2010~2012), but I don't remember anything ever coming of it.

Only 3 of those provide high-end ip.

  * NVidia Tegra - possible
  * ARM Mali - possible, but would not allow for much differentiation
  * Qualcomm - has never sold its GPU IP seperately

No, I can say with certainty that they are working on their own mobile GPU.

They have been hiring a lot of graphics people and putting a team together.

And another thing that most people are not really aware: Apple had a lot of saying in the architectural and design decisions of Imagination's GPUs that ended up on their iPhones. A good part of the development actually happened at Apple's offices with Imagination people flying over.

So they know what they are doing, they are very well familiar with Imagination's GPU and they are more than capable of developing their own thing from scratch.

> Apple had a lot of saying in the architectural and design decisions of Imagination's GPUs that ended up on their iPhones. A good part of the development actually happened at Apple's offices with Imagination people flying over.

So that's why Imagination is insisting Apple can't not infringe: they know Apple won't have a cleanroom implementation not using the guys who've talked to Imagination.

Apple have a classic "they saw the copyrighted sourcecode" problem on their hands.

Not really, you seriously think Apple would just let ImgTech guys come in without lawyers and agreements and all of that sort? Apple has extensive experience in this area, they had ImgTech signed everything possible to protect Apple and to indemnify themselves. It is a risk that ImgTech also took by allowing Apple deeper into the development process. This isn't a one-way street here.

Apple is extremely potent in protecting its technologies. There is no way they just let random ImgTech fly in and work on stuff with them without any agreements in advance. If this happened, ImgTech is going to be an easy billionaire by the end of the lawsuits they could do.

While I have no doubt that Apple works closely with their hardware partners by flying their engineers in to work on projects, I seriously doubt it was as simple as the OP made it sound.

It actually is as simple as the OP said.

That was the main reason why Apple went for Imagination instead of ARM or Qualcomm when it comes to mobile GPUs.

Imagination market cap has been falling hard in the latest years, so hard to the point that their only customer until now was Apple. They were desperate and they signed very risky deals in order to keep Apple as a customer.

And Apple is a complete control freak when it comes to their products, the idea of not being able to control the stuff they put on their products is unthinkable to them.

So Imagination signed a bunch of architectural deals (instead of purely implementation deals) because that was the real product Apple was looking for.

Don't let yourself be mistaken, this whole situation is far from a surprise to Imagination. They knew this day would come, they were just trying to cling on to the little market they could find until they found another deal in order to stay afloat.

I'm not sure where we crossed wires but we're saying the same thing, nothing you said changed what I said.

What I meant by OP is that it is not as simple as flying their partners in and they start working together and then leave. Apple doesn't just do that without ensuring everything that happens stays in Apple only. So, flying ImgTech guys in and out does not mean ImgTech owns the patents to what they did at Apple want or the other way around, Apple can ensure they have the exclusive rights to it.

nVidia made similar claims against Samsung (and Qualcomm) a couple of years ago. A lot of folks speculated that Samsung would lose not only because nVidia is a leader in GPU business, but also because Samsung is a foreign company.

Long story short, nVidia lost. (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/07/nvidia_and_samsung_...)

Samsung initially asked Qualcomm to deal with it since nVidia was really going after Qualcomm's Adreno GPU used in Samsung's smartphones in the US. Qualcomm instead decided to sit back and twiddle their thumbs as nVidia filed lawsuits against Samsung (and Qualcomm). Many predicted Samsung would end up like Apple vs Samsung considering Qualcomm's political clout and jury bias in the US, but the USITC quickly put an end to Qualcomm's misadventure. Samsung countersued and won, and Obama couldn't be bothered to reverse USITC's opinion, impending import ban, against Qualcomm.

Yeah, if you think about it companies like Apple have very little reason to pull out from a licensing deal unless they have a very good reason to (aka non-infringing tech on the way). They're not going to pull out and come back and say "We're sorry. Can you give us the same rate you offered before?"

From further down, "The company’s...IP...includes the key processing blocks needed to create the SoCs...that power all mobile, consumer and embedded electronics." I've never heard of the company but my assumption is that they've patented some critical part of the assembly process which means Apple is relying on them.

Patent threats and trolling should be punished, one way or the other. "We are the authority for GPUs, if you want to design one from scratch - it's impossible" should be punished.

If licensed to do so, that's how ARM works as far as I've known.