Abandoned Imagination decides to sell itself, China should take it into its pocket
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Imagination, a well-known British chip manufacturer, will lose about 60% of its revenue after its main customer Apple announced that it would stop using its GPUs, causing its stock price to plummet. However, its competitor Qualcomm's GPU performance is powerful and ARM's Mali GPU performance is also constantly improving. Faced with the bleak prospects, it recently announced that it will be sold in a package. This will be the best acquisition target for China. Imagination's business Imagination's main asset is its PowerVR GPU. In the current global mobile GPU market, Qualcomm, ARM and Imagination have formed a three-way split. Qualcomm's Adreno was acquired from ATI. After AMD acquired ATI, it was not optimistic about the prospects of mobile GPUs and sold it to Qualcomm. Now it has become one of Qualcomm's core technological advantages; ARM has a monopoly in the mobile CPU market, and after gradually realizing the importance of GPUs, it has also launched its own Mali GPU. Since Qualcomm's GPU is only used on its own Snapdragon chips, ARM and Imagination both license their GPUs to other chip design companies, so the two are direct competitors. The performance of ARM's Mali GPU is improving with each generation. The Mali G71 launched last year was used by Huawei HiSilicon on the Kirin 960. It uses eight cores and its performance is comparable to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820 at the time. Since ARM has a monopoly advantage in mobile CPUs, Imagination is gradually at a disadvantage in the competition. In view of this, Imagination acquired MIPS in 2012 in order to have its own CPU and GPU like ARM. MIPS and ARM are both chip design licensing companies. Unfortunately, after being acquired by Imagination, MIPS not only did not develop, but declined day by day, and failed to become a boost to Imagination's GPU business. Now that it has lost Apple, its largest customer, it will face the crisis of bankruptcy. The value of Imagination to China For China, the CPU and GPU patents owned by Imagination are exactly the hot cakes. Influenced by the Prism Gate and the US ban on Intel from selling high-performance server chips, China is actively developing its own server chip business, and the MIPS architecture is actually suitable for server chips. In the 1990s, the US SGI company used MIPS chips to make high-end workstations and servers. At present, the architectures of server chips, X86 and Power, are owned by the United States. Intel, which owns the X86 patent, cannot authorize the development of X86 server chips. Although IBM, which owns the Power architecture, has opened up authorization to Chinese companies, it is a US company and the server ecosystem of the Power architecture is not strong now. ARM has monopolized the mobile market and has just started in the server chip market, and ARM has been acquired by Japan's SoftBank. Now that Imagination is being sold, it is actually a more appropriate choice for China to acquire it to develop MIPS architecture server chips. China's mobile chip industry also needs MIPS. Most of China's chip design companies are based on the ARM architecture, but there are also companies such as Ingenic that are based on the MIPS architecture. In the case of ARM being acquired by Japanese companies, China should have its own core chip architecture development company as a backup, so that when Chinese companies cannot use ARM for some reason, they can also develop their own mobile chips based on MIPS. The performance of the GPU architecture held by Imagination is still very powerful, and it is not cost-effective for China to redevelop its own GPU architecture. China lacks its own talents. Apple is poaching people from Imagination to develop its own GPU, and it has been preparing for this for many years. China is now starting from scratch in terms of core GPU R&D talents. Patents are another problem. In order to solve the patent problem, Apple is in contact with NVIDIA and AMD, hoping to obtain their patent licenses. At present, China's VR/AR, artificial intelligence and other industries are on the rise, and these industries have demand for GPUs. The strong demand for GPUs in these industries leaves China no time to wait. Under such circumstances, it is very appropriate to acquire the GPU architecture held by Imagination. How should China acquire Imagination? I think it is not appropriate for any Chinese chip design company to acquire Imagination alone, because Imagination's GPU and CPU ecosystems are not as strong as its competitors. If any Chinese chip design company acquires it, it will cause other chip design companies to be unwilling to adopt Imagination's GPU and CPU architectures due to concerns about competition. This can be seen from the decline of Symbian, which was once the largest mobile phone operating system in the smartphone market. After Nokia acquired the shares of Symbian system held by Samsung mobile phone companies, many mobile phone companies abandoned Symbian system. Under such circumstances, perhaps it would be a better way for many domestic chip design companies to jointly invest in a company, and then have this company acquire Imagination to maintain Imagination's independent operation. This would be conducive to gathering the strength of domestic chip companies and jointly promoting the ecological development of Imagination's GPU and CPU. For Imagination, there is probably no other buyer more suitable than China. American chip companies are unlikely to adopt Imagination's CPU and GPU architecture. European chip design companies are declining. South Korea's Samsung is planning to develop its own GPU architecture. Japan already has ARM. Only China, the largest market, can provide Imagination with an imaginable huge space. For China, of course, it should act as soon as possible. Although Imagination is not very attractive to European, American, Japanese and Korean companies, it cannot be said that it is completely unattractive. After Imagination is determined to be sold, there are still some potential buyers who have negotiated with it. If China misses this opportunity, it will inevitably take more time and money to have its own CPU and GPU architecture, which is not conducive to the long-term development of China's chip industry, which is currently in a stage of rapid development. As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity. |
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