Sina US stocks, Apple Inc, January 3, Beijing timeThe company announced today that it will once again obtain a technology license from Imagination Technologies. Imagination Technologies is a UK-based chip design company that has supplied GPUs for iPhone and iPad.
Imagination posted a brief statement on its website, saying that it had signed a multi-year license agreement with Apple Inc, under which Apple Inc will be able to use "more intellectual property rights of Imagination."
Apple Inc announced his separation from Imagination as early as April 2017, when Apple Inc said he would start designing his own graphics chip and would stop licensing the company's technology within two years.
After announcing the end of the cooperation, Imagination expressed doubts about Apple Inc's ability to design its own chip "without infringing Imagination's patents, intellectual property rights and confidential information."
Even so, Apple Inc released iPhone 8 and iPhone X later that year, using Apple Inc's A11 bionic chip, which included Apple Inc's first Apple Inc-designed GPU, which Apple Inc said was 30 per cent faster than the previous one.
It is reported that Apple Inc also used his own GPU in iPad Pro in 2018. Imagination's share price fell sharply overnight after news of the termination of the agreement. Apple Inc informed him only a few days in advance that the deal was coming to an end, the company said.
Later that year, it was forced to sell itself to Silicon Valley's Canyon Bridge, a private equity firm, for 550 million pounds ($725 million). At the time, it insisted it was still "in dispute with Apple Inc".
Apple Inc is working hard to reduce his dependence on other chip manufacturers and is actively engaged in the manufacture of self-developed chips.
In 2018, the company bought a stake in chipmaker Dialog for $300m, licensed some of Dialog's power management technology and hired 300 engineers.
The following year, the company acquired Intel Corp(Intel) smartphone modem business, thus embarking on the road of producing its own modems. It is reported that the company even considered a similar acquisition at one point, but it is believed to have decided not to make a full acquisition.