Imagination Technologies is a British company that designs graphics processors that they then license out for companies to put on their chips. Take Apple’s iPad 2 for instance. The “Apple A5” chip inside the iPad 2 is actually made from a combination of intellectual property gathered from multiple vendors, most notably ARM, who makes the Cortex A9 application processor, and Imagination Technologies, who makes the PowerVR SGX 543MP2 graphics processor. Qualcomm is different. They do everything themselves. They license ARM’s architecture so that their chips can run code written for ARM processors, in much the same way that AMD makes chips based on the x86 architecture that Intel invented. Speaking about AMD, they sold their handset division to Qualcomm back in 2009. Qualcomm then used AMD’s intellectual property and talented engineers to design the graphics processors for their chips that today you recognize under the Adreno brand name.
So just to recap, Qualcomm does everything in house, meanwhile Imagination Technologies and ARM lets anyone with enough money use their processors. That technically means they’re competitors, which is why yesterday’s news that Qualcomm started licensing Imagination Technologies’ intellectual property came as such as shock. To be clear, Qualcomm isn’t licensing the PowerVR graphics processor that’s inside Apple’s chips, and many other companies’ chips, instead they’re using “the display IP from its PowerVR portfolio”.
We wish we could tell you what the hell that means, but everyone is pretty tight lipped at the moment. An Imagination Technologies spokesman said: “We’re delighted to have Qualcomm’s business and hope it leads to something more.” It’s far too early to speculate as to whether or not Qualcomm is having trouble keeping up with the competition in the performance department, but EE Times, the folks who broke the story, say Qualcomm needs to step up their game in time for the the first ARM based Windows 8 tablets, due to hit the market in the second half of next year.
[Via: The Verge]