Apple GPUIt`s long been rumored that Apple plans to start doing its own graphics hardware. Today it was reported that the company is in talks to buy Imagination Technologies, the company behind the PowerVR graphics tech currently found in iPhones and iPads, before Apple stamped out the fire.Still, Apple did confirm that conversations had happened, which alone is interesting and adds further speculation the buzz that Apple plans to bring 3D graphics in-house.Would doing so revolutionise gaming or even enable technologies like virtual reality on Apple`s mobile devices? Could we be looking at console quality gaming - even virtual reality gaming - powered by iPhones and iPads in the next few years? In-house graphics technology could also hint that at a radical new iOS interface in the works.We might be getting ahead of ourselves, but going by rumours, this GPU is being developed for Apple`s mobile devices. In other words, iPhones and iPads.After all, Apple already designs its own processor or CPU cores. With 3D graphics becoming ever more important, doing it in-house is an obvious next step for the world`s biggest tech company.Since we`re talking iPhones and iPads and not desktop or laptop Mac systems, the graphics tech in question isn`t a separate chip, but a graphics unit that`s integrated into a larger SoC or system-on-a-chip - a chip like the A9 SoC that powers the current iPhone 6S, for instance.The A9 has a pair of Apple`s own `Twister` CPU cores, compatible with the ARM instruction set used by the CPUs in most smartphones but designed in-house at Apple. The graphics in A9, however, is bought in from Imagination Technologies in the form of a so-called six-core PowerVR 7XT GT7600 GPU. Thus the quickest route for Apple to have full control over graphics is to simply buy Imagination. But why bother in the first place?The first thing to understand is that designing computer chip circuits is very, very difficult. That`s why it was only with the A6 chip in the iPhon ...
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