MIPS sold its patents, and then Imagination was bought

    Chipmaker Imagination Technologies today announced the purchase of MIPS Technologies, an American microprocessor developer!

    Now, for a long time, the collaborating companies Imagination and ARM Holdings can become the worst co-workers.
    You can also recall that ~ 15% of Imagination Technologies shares are owned by Intel, and another ~ 9% of Imagination shares is owned by such a technological giant as Apple - both companies actively use PowerVR GPU technologies - graphics processors developed by Imagination.

    Now it turns out a very interesting situation Intel is developing and releasing its processors on the x86 architecture, and Apple and ARM Holdings are developing their chips on the ARM architecture - and all these companies have so far been active partners of Imagination Technologies and suddenly the latter (perhaps unexpectedly for its partners) buys MIPS Technologies, which develops microprocessors based on the competing MIPS architecture , which could well take part of such markets from ARM processors as: 1. Smartphones, 2. Internet tablets and 3. Microservers (after all, MIPS Technologies even enters into Open Handset Alli ance and regularly transfers the latest versions of Google Android to its processors).

    Moreover, the most curious thing is that some consortium of companies led by ARM Holdings bought 498 MIPS Technology patents for $ 350 million.
    Imagination itself for just $ 60 million received from MIPS Technology the company itself, 160 people and only 82 remaining patents. But according to the Imagination press service, the patents obtained are directly related to processor architectures, processor instructions, and graphics technology.

    Imagination officially stated: “that in the future the company plans to develop the graphic direction by introducing MIPS technologies in it, and also to design a wider range of solutions.”
    A very bold statement, in fact (as I understand it) they say that they are ready to design chips with the MIPS + PowerVR GPU core, which will directly compete with all modern ARM processors such as NVidia Tegra 3, Apple A6X, etc.

    Today, cheap and low-power 32-bit MIPS processors are used in low-cost electronics, for example, in such products as: Smart TVs, satellite receivers, Blu-ray players, navigators, game consoles like Sony PlayStation / Sony PSP, Internet tablets and even routers.
    But once upon a time, even supercomputers manufactured by Silicon Graphics were built on 64-bit MIPS processors.
    In principle, the MIPS architecture has enormous potential and if a lot of money is invested in its development and promotion, it is quite possible to forget about the now fashionable ARM processors, because MIPS processors are more universal (different versions of MIPS processors can be used from navigators to powerful servers), more economical and so far have been cheaper!

    I am personally very curious about how this will all end:
    In a couple of years, everyone will forget about such a company as MIPS Technology, or will the ARM Holdings stock price fall into the abyss?

    What do you think about it?

    * See an article on the same topic: “The Future of Microservers on MIPS Processors” .
    Links to the news under discussion:
    * "The MIPS processor developer was purchased by British Imagination";
    * "Imagination acquired MIPS to confront ARM . "

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