With a new IP licensing deal with Apple in place, Imagination Technologies' CEO and other execs discuss trends and their RISC-V open source hardware strategy
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
Imagination Technologies' 2020 reconciliation with Apple closes a bruising three-year arc: after Apple backed out of an acquisition and hired senior staff including its COO in 2016, the GPU firm opened a formal dispute process with Apple in 2017 while planning to shed MIPS and Ensigma, then put itself up for sale outright when the licensing fight escalated.
The new multi-year agreement — replacing the February 2014 deal — restores Apple as a contracted customer, and executives are using the moment to lay out a RISC-V open-source hardware strategy, a hedge that later drew parallel moves from Intel's RISC-V acceleration program.
First-order effects
- Imagination exits the dispute-and-sale cycle with Apple back under multi-year licensing terms, stabilizing the revenue base that its 2017 withdrawal had put at risk.
- Management can now pitch a dual-track portfolio — licensed GPU IP plus RISC-V — instead of defending a single-customer licensing model.
Second-order effects
- Other IP licensors watching the Apple saga get a template for surviving customer concentration: keep the flagship license relationship while building an open-standard alternative revenue path.
- RISC-V gains another established silicon-IP vendor behind it, pressuring proprietary instruction-set holders to justify their licensing fees against a free alternative.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Imagination's hedge followed by Intel's RISC-V push — the industry drifts toward open instruction sets as insurance, eroding the moat around proprietary ISA licensing.
- Chip IP firms structurally reposition from dependent suppliers of one dominant customer to diversified platform vendors, changing how acquirers and investors value them.
The trend: Silicon IP vendors are pairing renewed big-customer licensing contracts with open-source ISA bets like RISC-V to insulate themselves from single-customer dependence.