151–160 of 201 posts
I wonder how likely it is for Apple to support Vulkan on its hardware.
They won't want devs to miss out on hardware features because the Vulkan abstraction (by its nature, cross platform) is missing a feature.
So it may happen but I'd imagine only after a strong native toolkit exists already
I wonder how likely it is for Apple to support Vulkan on its hardware.
I wonder how likely it is for Apple to support Vulkan on its hardware.
Finally a software company makes a GPU.
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.
But on a GPU, the whole interaction between the GPU and the application is abstracted by APIs like OpenGL and Vulkan and you own the driver, you own the compiler, you own the implementation and you own the architecture. So companies tend to protect their "secrets" since they own the whole product.
If you are asking me why is it different... Ask these patent trolls instead:
- https://techcrunch.com/2014/09/04/nvidia-sues-samsung-and-qu...
- http://www.anandtech.com/show/11101/amd-files-patent-complai...
It's not an excuse, it's the sad reality.
Finally a software company makes a GPU.
Everybody who has programmed in VHDL or Verilog knows that building hardware is very close to writing software actually. It's just a level of abstraction lower, and there is a lot more parallelism, but the concepts are very similar.
Synthesizing ASICs and FPGA designs from Verilog/VHDL/insertnewhighlevellanguagehere may be close to software, but I guarantee you that creating high end production chips with such strict efficiency constraints guarantees that you need to do heavy simulations, and most importantly, has massive verification (it is 10/7nm after all....) efforts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 "t…
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 prot…
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.
Finally a software company makes a GPU.
Everybody who has programmed in VHDL or Verilog knows that building hardware is very close to writing software actually. It's just a level of abstraction lower, and there is a lot more parallelism, but the concepts are very similar.