Imagination Technologies Share Discussion Threads

[sweenoid] 13/3/2017 17:56

I woukd prefer it not to occur because my preference is that the world will not be controlled by a handful of companies
I don't care about the LONG TERM is simply because I will no longer be invested here in the long term, my long term relationship with IMG will terminate by mid 2018 at the latest. in the meantime I am still very heavily invested here and as such want the company to do well and the share price to reflect that, but I simply don't care about what happens after I sell up, which is fairly obvious.
S

[twatcher] 13/3/2017 17:02

"The Intel/ Mobileye official announcement contains nothing threatening to IMG MIPS involvement in Mobileye's future. The MBLY founder will be running the company, I cannot see with the complexity of the EYEQ SOC's and more importantly the validation and verification processes that they undergo that MIPS will be replaced by Intel."

Dave...quite literally a moment ago you said a) you would have preferred it didn't happen and b) you didn't care. (IN CAPS)

Why prefer something not to happen, it it doesn't threaten IMG. If you don't care, why follow up and post about it ?....I'm confused

It's interesting that the first thing that happened when Spreadtrum got into bed with Intel is that they started to use Intel CPUs in their socs for the first time.

Intel's interest in car automation is a long term play, and it would be foolish to think that they have no aspirations to have Intel CPUs involved inside the car. The fact that it'll not happen until well into the 2020s (because many eyeQ5 deals will already be in concrete) means it'll not have a medium term effect on IMG. However it has to be seen as a long term threat to an industry that MIPS thought it had a tight grip on.

And of course the mobileye founder will be running the company, until it's decided by Intel he's no longer running the company. Things change.

[sweenoid] 13/3/2017 16:48

mea culpa ...but it goes into the bank though ;-)

[nearlythere] 13/3/2017 16:48

From the img Pr it looks like Furian has, once again, many technical advantages and I expect it will perform as expected (unlike some others were real world performance fails to match the spec). Of course Furian will be the best for area, speed and power but then so was series 6 7 and that did not stop img share of the Android phone market plummeting.

The problem has never been the technology which in the independent press and reviews has always exceeded the competition by a fair margin and has been used to great effect by apple. IE throttling was unheard off by img gpus while others were dropping up to 40% after 10 15 minutes. The difficulty has been the inability of management to get the GPu ip into socs. The situation is more of a problem today with arm mali seen as the de facto standard, even the growing Chinese soc makers have, for the most part, ignored img so far.

IMo for a small cap company to start to win back Android GPu phone markets it needs Furian to have the same lead that series 5 had over arm and qualcomm 6 years ago, making it must have ip. Otherwise why would socs makers risk their relationship with a multi billion pound company arm for img gpu with a far from certain future ( in debt, falling royalties, licenses, market share and a takeover risk).

So it will be interesting to see the first independant reports of Furian.

[swiftnick] 13/3/2017 16:00

Er, no. The sale of a fixed asset does not impact on the revenue line.

[sweenoid] 13/3/2017 15:08

Looks like we are going to have one of IMG's completely irrational 'runs'

The Intel/ Mobileye official announcement contains nothing threatening to IMG MIPS involvement in Mobileye's future. The MBLY founder will be running the company, I cannot see with the complexity of the EYEQ SOC's and more importantly the validation and verification processes that they undergo that MIPS will be replaced by Intel.

What with Intel's involvement with Spredtrum and their new PowerVR SOC's and now Intel and Mobileye , I think it just increases the chance of Intel taking out IMG - that possibility is now surely much higher.
Thanks Ian for Rhys's blog link- very encouraging indeed, I like his +ve comments on the new management team.Let's hope the positive rhetoric coming from IMG extends into next weeks trading statement ( it's due next week, may not come but I am sure it will). Aiding the revenues in this 1/2 will be the sale of HQ Pure building , it's going at a loss like the rest of the fire-sale but will add a juicy £4-5 million to revenues ( surely?). Also the comparator visa v the same period last year gets a 15% uplift on the weak £,

S

[twatcher] 13/3/2017 12:44

Rys Sommerfeldt,an IMG guy for several years, who posted alot of blog posts (including todays Furian piece) and who was part of the IMG competitive analysis team, is leaving IMG.

The latest post on his personal blog is very interesting. Gives his thoughts on the recent changes at IMG, and he seems very confident of the graphics product. In particular he feels 8XE is, on a competitive basis, the best solution out there, and he's confident that it'll get IMG a lot of wins at the lower end. He's bullish enough to say he'll become PI.

It's worth a read.

[pottsey] 13/3/2017 12:42

Now that you mention it that was an odd thing to miss out. I wouldn’t worry too much, my guess is they are separating the Furian blogs to extend PR over a wider timeframe. It wouldn’t surprise me to see more blogs on Furian.

The other possibility is there are no latency improvements over Rogue and the blog was only about the changes from Rogue to Furian. This might not be a bad as it sounds as Rogue had latency improvements made to it to deal with VR/AR so as long as Furian isn’t worse than Rogue it should be great for VR/AR

Also the main Furain page makes refrences to AR/VR.

[jamesrowe] 13/3/2017 11:56

Pottsey I was slightly surprised that the article made no mention of anything related to latency reduction for AR/VR which seems to be a big thing these days. That is not to say that there isn't any.... just that it wasn't publicised as a benefit which you might expect it to be.....

[sweenoid] 13/3/2017 11:36

MIPS is cemented into Mobileye eye4 and eye5 through Mobileye's product roadmap to 2021, it would take Intel until 2022 at least to replace MIPS into the eye45..6 etc line and why upset a winning franchise ?

Either ways I woukd have preferred this not to have happened, short-medium term will have no impact on IMG, I WONT BE AROUND FOR THE LONG TERM SO DONT CARE ;-)
S

[pottsey] 13/3/2017 11:05

"Work in this area also significantly benefits future Furian-based designs that implement our incredible ray-tracing technology. While talking to the architecture teams throughout Furian development, and even while doing final research for what to write here, it was crystal clear that Furian has its ray-tracing family members clearly in mind from the very start. Keep your eyes peeled for a Furian-based ray-tracing microarchitecture in the future!"



So a new Ray Tracing platform which could be intresting.

[twatcher] 13/3/2017 10:48

That could be bad news long term for MIPS. There has been various industry agreements and joint ventures announced, involving Mobileye, Intel and a few other players. It was expected that Intel would provide the back office processing and Mobileye would continue to provide the (MIPS based) in car processing.

One hardly sees Intel 'happy' using MIPS processing in-car, should they buy the company.

Mind you in-car designs are nailed-on many years ahead, so any change that MIGHT happen, shouldn't filter into products for a long time.

However, it's yet another MIPS niche that might be possibly taken out.

[taffy100] 13/3/2017 10:36

Intel to buy Mobileye for $14-$15 billion - Israeli media report

[taffy100] 13/3/2017 07:15

Imagination Technologies and Express Logic announce expansion of ThreadX RTOS support for MIPS CPUs




New embedded chip from Socionext features PowerVR Series8XE GPU from Imagination

[twatcher] 08/3/2017 20:33

So 8 series will be split across archs, 8xe will be rogue, 8XT (and 9 etc) will be Furian.

The anandtech article makes it clear that Rogue isn't going away anytime soon, in fact most of the 8Xe cores that have ben designed for low end haven't even made it to products yet.

The IMG piece does say it's already licensed by multiple customers. Given the many indication that Apple are doing a lot of graphics work themselves, and Apple is still by far the single biggest IMG money provider, one can easily conclude that many of the changes in Furian would be an Apple's request. For example the highlighted ability to "plug-in" function specific hardware and integrate tightly with the GPU, would allow add-on functionality as/when Apple decide it's feasible to put into the GPU block.

The anantech piece states that IMG Furian cores might just be seen in end-user products tale-end of 2018

So that means that for this years iphone we have:-
a) Same as last year, with a higher clock faciliated by going to a 10nm process
b) Rework of existing IP.
c) Apple may have already gotten the plans for Furian, and are designing their own specific graphic IP around it. Although designed on the Furian IP, these would not be IMG cores, in that they would not be built on cores that IMG have designed for customers, hence being consistent with the anantech statement.

Interested to know who the other customer is, who has already had some early deliverables.

[brooky] 08/3/2017 17:46

Mark papermaster of AMD is speaking now in Santa Clara at the img summit.

[pottsey] 08/3/2017 16:14

Well looks like the Rogue architecture is dead, well on the way out anyway. Just hope the Furian architecture does far better. All those years ago I said rogue was shaping up to be a disappointment. A lot of people like Sweenoid disagreed with Rob and my views back then but I believe we was right and Rogue has underperformed overall. Furian on the other hand looks far more promising.

[taffy100] 08/3/2017 16:05

Imagination’s new PowerVR Furian GPU architecture will deliver captivating and engaging visual and vision experiences

[nearlythere] 08/3/2017 14:31

So far there has been little or no movement on RT. The test chips have been out for around 12 months and if it is "Disruptive " I see little evidence so far, other than imgs Pr, I have read no rumours about img RT. Anything on RT would be a bonus but I have been hearing about RT for 7 years and so far all we have is a few test chips and a lot off hot air ( and a sizable R+D cost) with licenses IMO still 12 18 months away meaning socs 3 to 4 years.

More importantly the GPu news has been disappointing, so far X30 and a gpu with an intel CPu are highlights, both of which are hardly going to set royalty records and are unlikely to replace the royality numbers lost by intel.

After a series of very poor shows in 2015 2016 unless the next show provides a slew of actual socs using img GPu or GPu licenses then IMO the license and royalties revenue will continue its decline. So far this management team, like the last, talk a lot but IMO have not performed at img actual business of selling ip and in particular GPu ip.

I expect the apple A11 will have a series 8 and once again be a major showcase for img gpus advantages lets hope, unlike series 6 and 7, they are sufficient to persuade others use it.

[gez] 08/3/2017 12:11

cant remember if this has been posted before....but around 24.30 of the podcast, the CEO of Otoy seems extremely impressed by img RT performance

[rjwooll] 07/3/2017 13:08

I wonder if an IMG/AMD connection could be a result of Apple perhaps planning to standardise on IMG graphics across its range? There have been rumours of an ARM/iOS powered Macbook Air for some time which would use a powerful variant of the iPad graphics I expect. Given the investment Apple is making in IMG based graphics it may not be that far fetched a move - particularly as & when RT is included. AMD may have the option to take up a production license to supply IMG based graphics components to Apple for its Macbook range.

Pure speculation!

[pottsey] 07/3/2017 10:58

The problem is at GDC we found out IMG RT is not in AMD's next generation of GPU's. Its way too early to be talking about the generation after when the next generation is still a fair way out. March/April is all about AMD's next generation of GPU’s do you really think they are going make a big announcement about the generation after, which would take away from next generation GPU PR they are pushing at the moment? It would be very odd timings if they did announcement an RT lisince at the Summit.

[borromini1] 07/3/2017 08:39

James - I would tend to broaden the definition of workstation to cover any computer with a dedicated graphics card and video RAM rather than integrated graphics capability. To help AMD's cause with Apple they will need to add IMG RT to Radeon and mobile Radeon cards as these are used in iMac desktop and Macbook Pro laptop models. Apple currently sells between 4 and 5 million Macs per quarter. Software or games will certainly need to be changed to take advantage of this new functionality but my understanding is that the hardware and OS will provide a more economically viable route to real time RT than software alternatives. With regard to Windows, IMG RT implementation on FirePro would be a substantial proving ground and could address a much larger retrofit market.