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Before this April, Imagination Technologies announced that it would no longer provide cardinal graphics IP to Apple inside 15 to 24 months (July 2018 to Apr 2019). The announcement sent the company'due south stock plunging, and Imagination soon announced that it would seek to sell off at least two business segments: MIPS, its low ability and embedded microprocessor sectionalisation; and Ensigma, its low-power wireless division. The program, at least initially, was to double down on its core graphics concern, which has produced the bulk of the visitor'due south revenue in recent years.

Now information technology seems plans to break the company upward and sell it piecemeal have themselves been canceled. Imagination announced Th that "[O]ver the last few weeks it has received interest from a number of parties for a potential acquisition of the whole Group. The Board of Imagination has therefore decided to initiate a formal sale process for the Group and is engaged in preliminary discussions with potential bidders."

Separately, however, it notes that negotiations for sales of the MIPS and Ensigma lines are yet ongoing. That seems to advise that what Imagination considers the whole Group is its PowerVR concern, and not much else. If there's annihilation surprising about this, it's how far Imagination has fallen in a relatively brusque period of time. It's non just a question of losing Apple tree'southward business; Apple has obviously been building its ain GPU cores for rather longer than anyone realized (or at least, longer than anyone realized earlier last year).

In that location was a time, back in Q1 2012, when Jon Peddie Research noted that Imagination Technology had a larger share of the mobile graphics market then every other GPU IP-providing visitor combined. Today, information technology's a ghost of its quondam self. And then what happened?

In one give-and-take: ARM.

One point of clarification nosotros need to make, or else the graph we're about to show won't make much sense. JPR's comments about Imagination'southward market share in Q1 2012 were comparing the company with other IP developers that provided GPU-specific IP, not companies like Qualcomm, which have an integrated SoC and evidently utilize their own GPU IP for graphics processing. As the slide beneath shows, nevertheless, Imagination was still a stiff contender, even compared with Qualcomm.

BoAGraph

Market share by full number of design wins

I have no idea why the graph author used 2 virtually identical shades of blue for the same graph, but information technology'due south the taller line that represents Imagination Engineering science'south design wins. While this graph just runs through the finish of 2013, the trend is clear: ARM began aircraft its own Mali line of GPUs, and Imagination Technologies' design wins started to tank.

It's not difficult to see why, either. What practice Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Apple all have in common? They sell (or in Nvidia's case, sold) SoCs into the tablet and smartphone space with integrated GPUs. Imagination Technologies had a good GPU core and multi-year licensing deals with companies like Intel and Apple, but Intel eventually rolled its own graphics cadre, ARM debuted a GPU that information technology could sell you right alongside a bog standard Cortex-class CPU, and Qualcomm bought and developed Adreno off of AMD.

Imagination, to its credit, did see the writing on the wall, but they didn't see it quickly enough. Information technology bought MIPS on Feb eight, 2013, before ARM had begun to eat a serious slice of its own market share. The problem was, past that point the manufacture had already standardized on ARM for mobile devices. I know in that location've been a few MIPS-powered Android products, though I'yard not certain if any of them ever made it to united states. But both Imagination and Intel ran into serious problems trying to build an Android ecosystem effectually an alternative CPU compages.

Imagination Technologies probably will find a heir-apparent, given the company's years of expertise in GPU design and its existing client base, but who and what that will be is anyone's gauge. The company has announced information technology will proceed to pursue legal action against Apple over alleged infringement of Imagination's IP — the simplest way for Apple tree to make that particular problem go away might be to buy IT outright.