Discussions with Apple regarding license agreement

Post by Aissen » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:27 PM UTC

coderjames wrote: post #108

nottorp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intellectual property is complicated - there must be some patent that Apple would infringe anyway. Perhaps the one on breathing...

Or PowerVR texture compression, which according to Anandtech is the canonical method for iOS development: "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-...

Post by pyb » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:28 PM UTC

skc wrote: post #106

Silly question, why can't Apple just buy the company outright.

Post by flamedoge » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:36 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #122

jordskott wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open sourcing commercial products like hardware architecture and algorithms to the public is not exactly an easy thing to do. 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 nee…

Why has open source been so successful on the CPU then? Branch prediction, say, is no less a patent minefield than GPU framebuffer tiling. Yet gcc and LLVM have no trouble shopping optimizers. This is an excuse, basically. They just don't want to because they fear revenue lost to compatible implementations.

Post by monocasa » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:45 PM UTC

wolfgke wrote: post #69

neuromancer85 wrote: post #11

Time for ImgTech to go Linux/Mesa friendly maybe? With an open source graphic stack they could become a great choice for projects like Raspberry Pi and other hw manifacturers: imagine a Vulkan-ready linux laptop that combines a rpi Compute module with the graphic potential from their GPUs... Hope they would be this brave.

According to the post at https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Power-VR... from 2015, PowerVR is/was working on an open source driver. Does anybody know whether something materialized from this?

Post by monocasa » Mon, Apr 03, 2017, 3:48 PM UTC

AlphaSite wrote: post #127

jordskott wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already made a comment about Apple's GPU here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14021814 Apple actually has its own mobile GPU, built from scratch. The Tile-Based Deferred Rendering GPU is an advantage from the GPU sharing the same memory with the GPU. On a normal desktop GPU you need to transfer huge amounts of data from the main CPU RAM to the Video Ram but on a mobile device, the CPU and the GPU sit both on…

Both Nvidia and AMD have already switched or are moving towards tile based rendered to reduce bandwidth (and hence energy) costs.