101–110 of 201 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not? They don't seem to have any other customers.
Indeed. From their 2016 Annual Report, "There are no parties with whom the Group has contractual or other arrangements which are essential to the business of the Group except the contract with Apple Inc." https://imagination-technologies-cloudfront-assets.s3.amazon...
In the GPU space it is impossible to not infringe on the IP of other vendors. In fact it is the major reason GPU vendors give for not having an open source driver. I have spoken to the CTO (Jem Davies) of ARM about the GPU drivers and open sourcing them more than once. And every time I've gotten the reply: "No, we can't, it opens us up to IP infringement suits." Full disclosure: I used to work in the ARM GPU division…
One should keep in mind, this is true of basicly any software whatsoever. It ALL infringes on patents, nearly without exception. There is always legal risk in open sourcing code. Infact there is legal risk from pretty much any action whatsoever. Good, responsible companies don't let that become a barrier to doing the right thing. If ARM really cared, GPU stuff would be open source. The fact it isn't pretty strong ind…
Put simply, the GPU vendors do not actually own all the rights to their own driver software. AMD had a project to improve the state of their drivers on Linux, but the approach they took was to try and rewrite and open source the code implementing the public API to the closed binary blobs inside the drivers, to make it easier to maintain the stability of the drivers across kernel versions. Open sourcing the blobs wasn't possible for AMD because the code in them just doesn't belong to AMD.
>Don't just accept it when lawyers say no.
Which lawyers though? It's not necessarily ARM lawyers that are the problem. You'd need to get agreement from the dozens of patent holders of various bits of the technology, most of whom are unknown as their identities are confidential.
This is interesting: "Imagination believes that it would be extremely challenging to design a brand new GPU architecture from basics without infringing its intellectual property rights, accordingly Imagination does not accept Apple’s assertions." Could Apple not be using someone else's IP, for example from NVidia or AMD?
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 peop…
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.
> Apple license fees and royalties, as disclosed in Imagination’s Annual Report, represented revenue of £60.7 million for the year ended 30 April 2016 and are expected to be approximately £65 million for the year ending 30 April 2017 > Imagination believes that it would be extremely challenging to design a brand new GPU architecture from basics without infringing its intellectual property rights. Well Apple has a ~$7…
Apple can build a GPU without infringing ImgTec patents, through a patent agreement with another GPU maker(including ARM, so they're pretty much covered).
However, it sounds like ImgTec is considering going full-on troll, so they won't need access to the other patents any more and can just sit under their bridge extorting tolls.
In the GPU space it is impossible to not infringe on the IP of other vendors. In fact it is the major reason GPU vendors give for not having an open source driver. I have spoken to the CTO (Jem Davies) of ARM about the GPU drivers and open sourcing them more than once. And every time I've gotten the reply: "No, we can't, it opens us up to IP infringement suits." Full disclosure: I used to work in the ARM GPU division…
One should keep in mind, this is true of basicly any software whatsoever. It ALL infringes on patents, nearly without exception. There is always legal risk in open sourcing code. Infact there is legal risk from pretty much any action whatsoever. Good, responsible companies don't let that become a barrier to doing the right thing. If ARM really cared, GPU stuff would be open source. The fact it isn't pretty strong ind…
There are millions of registered patents and the chances that your clean-slate ideas were already invented and patented are really high.
Open sourcing means exposing patent infringements to the public (even if you are not really aware that you are infringing anything), which means that you need to invest on a strong legal team in order to go through all possible patents and to deal with all possible litigations you might face.
In order words, open source requires much more than ideals, it also requires butt loads of money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If ARM really cared, GPU stuff would be open source. The fact it isn't pretty strong indication they don't. Don't just accept it when lawyers say no. Easy for you to say, harder when millions to hundreds of millions are at stake.
Its always easier to be an armchair critic, but I bet there are more than hundreds of millions waiting for whoever can de-crappify the embedded ARM driver ecosystem. Especially when this crap is at the root of why virtually every embedded linux product has serious security flaws that never get fixed. You cant update the kernel if you cant update the drivers.
If you want to blame someone, starting by blaming the OEM.
> Further, Imagination believes that it would be extremely challenging to design a brand new GPU architecture from basics without infringing its intellectual property rights, accordingly Imagination does not accept Apple’s assertions. I know that designing new GPU from scratch isn't an easy task - but is it THAT hard that they don't trust that one of the richest companies in the world is capable of doing it?
Intellectual property is complicated - there must be some patent that Apple would infringe anyway. Perhaps the one on breathing...
"Because Apple’s SoCs have always used GPUs from the same vendor, certain vendor-specific features like PowerVR Texture Compress (PVRTC) are widely used in iOS app development"
[0] http://www.anandtech.com/show/11243/apple-developing-custom-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its always easier to be an armchair critic, but I bet there are more than hundreds of millions waiting for whoever can de-crappify the embedded ARM driver ecosystem. Especially when this crap is at the root of why virtually every embedded linux product has serious security flaws that never get fixed. You cant update the kernel if you cant update the drivers.
If there is a reason on why ARM's GPU drivers are not updated on your device, it's hardly ARM's fault. ARM doesn't ship the SoC or the device directly to you, it ships it to the OEM. And it's the OEM who states the agreements. If you want to blame someone, starting by blaming the OEM.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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...