Imagination Shows Signs Of Trouble; Here's What It Can Do To Recover

[Lucian Armasu]

Imagination announced a significant restructuring of the company, which includes significant cost-cutting as well as laying off 20 percent of the workforce. These could be just the first warning signs for the company, unless it changes its strategy.

Imagination Shows Signs Of Trouble; Here's What It Can Do To Recover : Read more

 

[Mac266]

"the company may have pushed chip makers into ARM’s, er, arms."

Pure win there folks.

 

[ZolaIII]

Real answer would be a Spedtrum & generally better collaboration with Chinese manufacturers. Chinese have always had a interest in Mips CPU's & I am certain that they wouldn't have anything against Power VR that is if the pricing is good. With recent announcements of new gen being a smaller & more efficient if they play they card's well I am certain they will do better.

 

[hellwig]

Later, everyone started believing AMD’s chips were generally “worse” than Intel’s chips, at all pricing levels. In the end, that actually became true, because AMD had fewer and fewer resources to put into its chip business.

Why are you throwing shade at AMD? AMD still wins the budget segment.

Anyway, why did ARM overtake MIPS? There had to be a reason (cost, performance, etc.?). If Imagination didn't do anything to address THOSE issues, then why would they have ever expected MIPS to make a come back?

 

[mavikt]

Anyway, why did ARM overtake MIPS?

Have you ever read Dilbert?

 

[bit_user]

No mention of Vivante? I wonder if that's not their biggest threat, in the Asian market.

The only rationale I see for them buying MIPS is to build full SoCs and be a direct competitor to Qualcomm. But they didn't need MIPS to do that - it'd just be a cost-savings, since they wouldn't have to pay royalties to ARM. So, if that was their plan, they should have focused on getting that business off the ground, and then adding MIPS cores as a cost-saving option.

There's the following moonshot scenario. If their raytracing gamble pays off, and major engines add support for it, then a selling point of Imagination GPUs in Android devices would be that you could get better quality in certain mobile games. That might be enough of a selling point for them to gain traction in the Android market. Meanwhile, perhaps they could get some income licensing their raytracing IP to certain competitors.