Imagination Technologies Share Discussion Threads

[hammerd2] 19/9/2017 08:31

I'm all for extra checks on the deal D. The last thing we want is the Chinese having fabulous graphics ! Whatever will we do if they can draw more shaded triangles than other companies ? Far more important than all that nuclear nonsense. 😀😀

[jamesrowe] 19/9/2017 08:18

Bizarre isn't it.... IMG and ARM have always been allowed to license their IP to China as part of successful UK businesses but people worry about China actually owning that IP. Security concerns are just a red herring. This is about Trump trade policies.

[sweenoid] 19/9/2017 07:56

The idea that HMG could put any offer 'on hold' is ridiculous, there is no regulatory OR legal framework for it to be able to do so. The US has that authority by statute, law and advisory panel. This argument is becoming ridiculous. The Chinese are buying up London, part running our nuclear industry and are a major buyer of U.K. Government debt!

[theyak] 18/9/2017 18:34

When that happens after hours, it seems like earlier trades but showing with later times, sometimes during the day trades are shown an hour later which can make the real time prices look odd. I've not been drinking honest!

[jamesrowe] 18/9/2017 17:57

You are correct. They were so late (one at 17:02!!!) that it never even occurred to me to check.So we can see a large buy order that pushed the price up to 135 then 2 small trades at around 130 around half an hour after the market closed that brought the price down again. Who would want to sell at 130 when the price is 135?? Is this just price manipulation?

[freddie ferret] 18/9/2017 17:43

Two well after hours showing 130 ish.

[freddie ferret] 18/9/2017 17:42

Check trades data??

[jamesrowe] 18/9/2017 17:39

??? Now showing back up above 134 again and daily chart is back at top of this board..... iii still down though!

[jamesrowe] 18/9/2017 17:37

Anyone any idea what just happened to the share price?? It looked like it had closed up strongly at 134ish then when I refreshed my screen I lost the days chart (which usually remains until the opening the following day) and the price had dropped significantly to around 130!! Same on iii.

[hammerd2] 18/9/2017 17:15

Anyone au fait with the norms - if such things exist - in terms of timing protocols ?

Bids are presumably normally announced by the offeror rather than the offeree right ? But do IMG have to announce on receipt, when they decide to agree or reject it, or before or after trading hours ?

Do announcements have to be in concert with the offeror's or the offeree's home market hours or is it just random ?

If Canyon are actually preparing a bid - they're a private firm I think but are deemed US ? When the concerns are about their Chineseness.

I only recall IMG announcing the MIPS deal but I wasn't looking at MIPS releases so can't say with any degree of certainty.

[life of crime] 18/9/2017 16:56

Fair enough hammered. I expect a takeover to happen because, despite the Apple issue, IMG still have a lot of valuable IP and talented staff that will attract more than one bidder, IMO.

If I were a bidder I would wait to see what the iPhone teardown showed but, apart from that, an offer cannot be too far away. I will post again when the inevitable offer comes through, to congratulate holders on a healthy premium!

[jamesrowe] 18/9/2017 12:06

I am not sure whether A11 is fabbed on Samsung or TMSC but in terms of the following general principle it probably doesn't matter:

"According to Samsung, 10nm chips can fit 30 percent more transistors within the same physical area as a 14nm chip. Chip designers will be able to create chips that are up to 27 percent faster or chips that use up to 40 percent less power, though most chips will probably do a little of both instead of maximizing one or the other."



Based on that 14nm to 10nm example it seems likely to me that Apple could have achieved a 30% performance increase soley from moving to 10nm from 16nm so I would be surprised if they had done much moore that re-jig their existing design to enable it to run on 10nm and bolted on some extra goodies. If so it is extremely likely that an IMG designed Furian solution with an equivalent number of cores/clusters running on 10nm could match or exceed the performance of the A11.

[twatcher] 18/9/2017 11:02

The specified 30% GPU performance improvement from A10 to A11, sounded to me like a much smaller GPU performance improvement than Apple had historical announced.

I'm led to beleive that it is indeed the smallest stated increase by Apple in any full A series update. the next smallest was 50% improvement A7-> A8 and A9->A10.

And remember A11 is 10nm compare to A10 on 16nm.

Now you could say the need for graphics performance increases has plateau-ed, but that hasn't stopped Apple in the past 10 years. Or that they had a reduced soc area available to the GPU, for the neutal net stuff.But similarly, Apple haven't historically shied away from making big chips.

One could reasonable conclude then that this GPU has signficantly less outright performance that what Apple could have gotten from using a standard Furian.

[hammerd2] 17/9/2017 22:27

loc - I'm sure it will have some bearing (at risk is minimum of £30/60m of revenue after all) for the bidding companies. I just personally don't care as long as a bid/some bids materialise and frankly if a bid gets to £600m I wouldn't care if they deducted that revenue as a contingency. I have almost zero interest now in IMG technology. As i may have mentioned. A few times ⚒

[borromini1] 17/9/2017 18:53

One thing leads to another, if ARM had not been sold out by its management and a majority of it's shareholders last year. If Theresa May and the Tories can't stop their addiction to celebrating the sale of any previously largely UK owned assets to foreign entities as the only economic policy in the continued bailout of the UK's perpetual trade deficit. Would we be in a position where the new Japanese owners of ARM have reportedly decided to rule themselves out of a bid for IMG?

Would the merger of ARM and IMG have made a powerhouse of world class chip IP or would it end up with a situation worse than we have now?

[life of crime] 17/9/2017 17:26

Hammered, the issue of whether or not IMG IP is in this, or future generations, of the iPhone will matter to a buyer and what they offer, surely?

The prospect of taking Apple to the cleaners at some point in a court room is bound to be reflected in the offer price today.

[hammerd2] 17/9/2017 16:08

Theresa Might's plans to try to veto foreign takeovers didn't make it into the Queen's speech so there are no new regulations on the subject to do any more about veto'ing than there were when ARM got bought.

I'm way beyond caring whether or not IMG tech is still in iPhones. Let's just have a bid. Any sort of bid. Soon.

[life of crime] 17/9/2017 15:05

The Times piece is spot on, but tells us nothing new. We all know Apple have turned IMG over and have lowered their reputation in the process, but they do not care. In the long run I think their hubris will catch up with them, the way it did with Nokia, especially now Steve Jobs is not there to help them.

If Canyon sell MIPS as a condition of their bid, to please the US, I expect the weakened UK govt to allow the offer to go through. It is fair to make the point that the funding of Hinkley by the Chinese has bigger implications for the UK than the acquisition of IMG!

Whoever buys IMG, I hope they have enough resources to sue Apple and bring them down a peg or two.

[timbob2000] 17/9/2017 13:29

Yes it is interesting isn't it that we would allow the Chinese to own 33% of Hinkley Nuclear (+ ownership of other sites) but we wouldn't let them buy IMG. And we would also allow the Japanese to buy the crown Jules (ARM) from us. In my opinion allowing ARM to be bought by any foreign company was a mistake. But it was allowed so be it... I agree with you Sweenoid, having allowed such business decisions to take place in the past I cannot see how HM Government could possibly turn round and block an IMG sale to Canyon. Especially if Canyon give gurantees of additional investment in IMG and keep IMG in the UK etc etc.

[sweenoid] 17/9/2017 08:03

2 articles of interest in The Times
1st is truthful and accurate I believe



The second indicates just how RIDICULOUS any interference in a bid by Canyon would be



When a Chine company has such significant control of Britain's NUCLEAR POWER industry how could HM Government possibly veto a bid for IMG???

Seems The Times and Telegraph think a bid is imminent?

[timbob2000] 16/9/2017 20:40

It appears to me that there are people trying to turn this issue of selling to the Chinese into something much bigger. Why would selling IMG to the Chinese be any different than selling to Japan or South Korea? This is purely political fan fare which appears at this stage to be largely driven by the media, whom I think are looking to create a story.

[jamesrowe] 16/9/2017 17:54

I believe that a significant impact on Apples power efficient designs was its acquisition of Intrinsity which previously provided consultancy to clients to produce power efficient processors by using particular logic gates in certain parts of the processors. I suspect that this is what they did over the years to IMG designs to improve power efficiency of the graphics.

[sfj] 16/9/2017 10:40

From Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._SemiP. A. Semi concentrated on making powerful and power-efficient Power Architecture processors called PWRficient, PWRficient processors were shipping to select customers, and were set to be released for worldwide sale in Q4 2007.[6]There were rumors that P. A. Semi had a relationship with Apple that suggested Apple would be the premier user of the PWRficient processors. That relationship supposedly ended with the Apple–Intel transition On 23 April 2008, Apple announced that they had acquired P. A. Semi.

[pottsey] 16/9/2017 09:03

That is one badly written article, who ever wrote it clearly doesn't understand the market and didn't do the most basic of fact checking.

Is the 'P.A Semi' Apple story true? "the company actually has a precedent of pretending to end a relationship and then swooping in to acquire at a later date (it’s perfectly legal). In fact, in the case of their CPU division, the company actually ‘apparently’ had ended relations with P.A Semi before swooping in to buy it out." Not got time right now to look into it.