[hyperpallium]

> 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.

Sounds like IMG has some fundamemtal IP that nVidia and AMD already license? They certainly have tied up their Tile-Based Deferred Rendering method, which never sounded that efficient to me (yet, Apple beats others graphically, so I probably don't appreciate it - maybe to do with cache efficiency?).

Apple, having understood this technique very well, might have thought of something even better.

They certainly would have to be pretty sure about their tech before sending this notification. Let's hope this... betrayal doesn't have the same fallout for customers as ~~google~~ maps did.

[jordskott]

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 the same memory system. This allows you to architecture your GPU in a different way.

Both ARM's Mali and Qualcomm's Adreno use Tile-Based Deferred Rendering.

[AlphaSite]

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

[monocasa]

Source? That's a huge architectural change for them.

[kevindqc]

http://www.realworldtech.com/tile-based-rasterization-nvidia...

[monocasa]

So that's tile based rasterization not tile based rendering. There's a huge difference. This is basically just a cache before the ROPs write into DRAM.

EDIT: Also, I don't think his test is proving what he thinks it is.