For years, a company called Imagination Technologies gave Apple the tech behind your iPhone’s Retina-ready graphics and eye-popping image processing. That relationship ended today. From here on out, according to an Imagination Technologies release, Apple will design its own underlying technology for GPUs. The reason is simple: It’s officially too important to entrust to someone else.

Losing such a major customer has cratered Imagination Technologies stock; about half the company’s annual revenue came from Apple. But that doesn’t mean Apple’s sudden yen for graphics independence should come as a surprise. In fact, it was inevitable.
Graphics Content

Graphics are the future. Not only that, but they’re increasingly important in the present: Graphics processors underpin virtually all of the features and experiences that today’s tech companies scramble to lead in.

Machine learning? GPUs. Augmented and virtual reality? Likewise. And while it often gets lost in the conversation around glitzier use cases, good old-fashioned, high-resolution gaming horsepower leans heavily on GPUs too.

That’s partly because of how graphics processors work. While traditional CPUs process things sequentially, a GPU can crunch a huge number of calculations in parallel. They’re the multitaskers of the silicon world, adept at the kind of mega-scale data churn that CPUs can only dream of.

“The GPU is being leaned on more heavily than it ever has before,” says Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights & Strategy. “With the right algorithm, you can get 10 times the performance per watt [a key measure of computational efficiency] with a GPU on machine learning than you can with a CPU.”

You just can’t overstate the importance of that sort of machine learning, in which Apple has been a quiet but important player. As Backchannel reported last year, it’s what gives Siri its smarts and predicts what app you might need at any given moment. It provides the connective tissue that helps your iPhone anticipate your every need.

Despite recent inroads, that’s an area in which Apple still lags well behind Google. Apple has even ceded important digital assistant ground to Amazon, whose Alexa currently converses on dozens of devices—including the iPhone.

Apple similarly finds itself underdeveloped in augmented and virtual reality, fields that haven’t yet gone fully mainstream but are by now at least mainstream-adjacent. It’s clearly an area of intense focus; Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told The Independent that he sees AR as “a big ideal like the smartphone,” with potentially iPhone-like impact.

As for high-resolution, stutter-free graphics, well, those still matter, especially when your years-long quest to conquer the living room coalesces in the Apple TV, a tiny black box that strives to keep up with full-fledged consoles.

So yes, graphics are a big deal for every tech giant—and especially for Apple, which appears to have some catching up to do. They matter so much, in fact, that Apple didn’t have any other choice.
Going It Alone

Apple has, of course, been making its own processors for years. Its Ax series SoC garners the most attention, since it’s the brain behind the iPhone. In recent years, though, Apple branched out: The Sx series supports the Apple Watch. The W1 enables the Bluetooth magic that keeps Air Pods connected. And the T1 popped up in last year’s MacBook Pro, providing an extra security layer for the Touch Bar and its fingerprint-reading Touch ID feature.

“In general, Apple likes to own as much of the underlying technology for its products as possible, and it already has a deep investment in chips,” says Jan Dawson, founder of Jackdaw Research.

If anything, look at Apple’s move into graphics as a continuation of a trend it helped start. Rather than rely on outside partners for critical components, an increasing number of large-scale tech companies have invested in rolling their own silicon. The advantages are manifold; you can design them to work specifically with your own devices, find novel ways to differentiate, and avoid getting dragged down if something goes wrong on someone else’s watch.

Not only that, but Apple’s also good at this. Moorhead notes that the Ax series performance improves around 25 percent every year, a pace that the veteran analyst “never seen before.”

That’s not to say that Cupertino will automatically replicate its mobile CPU success in the graphics realm. “I liken GPUs to black magic,” says Moorhead. “It’s really, really hard to get right. And there are fewer people who know how to do it.”

In fact, that confluence of factors—difficulty of execution and scarcity of talent—signals what seems to be the biggest potential roadblock to Apple’s new core competence: whether it can design an effective graphics processor without getting sued. A lot.

That already seems to be on Imagination Technology’s mind. “Apple has not presented any evidence to substantiate its assertion that it will no longer require Imagination’s technology, without violating Imagination’s patents, intellectual property, and confidential information,” the company said in a statement Monday. And it won’t be the only rival keeping close eyes on what Apple comes up with.

“There is a big question about where Apple will get the patent licenses and so on that it needs,” says Dawson. But both he and Moorhead also suggest that it’s a highly solvable problem. Companies like ARM willingly license out technology, which could provide some legal coverage. Or Apple could apportion out some of its nearly $250 billion cash hoard to snap up a patent-loaded chipmaker. Building up IP quickly takes two things Apple happens to stockpile: ingenuity and money.

Besides, even if there is some risk, it’s worth every bit of it for Apple to control its own graphics destiny. It’s going to dig into GPUs as though its life depended on it—because increasingly, it does.

source: https://www.wired.com/2017/04/apples...ntrol-destiny/