In the spring of this year, Apple forced the company Imagination Technologies to ask the classic question: "To be or not to be?". In two years, Apple plans to stop paying royalties to Imagination. Now the developer of gadgets from Cupertino pays Imagination deductions for graphic technologies PowerVR. This brings Imagination to half of the consolidated revenue and the lion's share of the revenue for the PowerVR cores. If this money stops coming, Imagination will lose money to develop new products.
To prepare for this moment, Imagination Technologies has decided to focus on the architecture and technologies of PowerVR and sell everything else, including the MIPS, DSP and special Ensigma computing units, as well as the IMGworks group to develop single-chip highly integrated solutions on their own architectures. IMGworks, as it became known a few days ago, was the first to go under the knife of optimization.
The British company Sondrel has agreed to buy IMGworks for an unnamed sum. It is an independent developer of custom LSI and other highly integrated solutions. In the process of absorption, IMGworks engineers will go to work in Sondrel and, thus, increase the staff of this company to more than 250 employees.
According to the Sondrel management, the experience of IMGworks engineers will help the company create solutions with advanced integrated graphics. This is all the more important because graphical cores are beginning to be widely used for solving non-graphical problems. These are technologies related to artificial intelligence, including autopilots, supercomputing and machine learning. Also, the demand for products with Internet connection is growing, which allow to more fully recruit the experience of Imagination specialists.