After investing billions of dollars in developing processor chips for the iPhone and iPad, the company Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), is now turning its attention to graphic cards. Apple now buys graphics cards from its partner Imagination Technologies, but it also wants to control this component of its products, so it invests in their development.
Apple has hired a lot of engineers from Imagination Technologies, the company that produces PowerVR graphics cards, and with their help it will develop its own components. No one knows yet how much money Apple will invest, or how many engineers have the role of developing this project, but it is an extremely important one for those from Cupertino.
By developing its own chips for iDevices, the Apple company managed to position its terminals in the top smartphone/tablets in terms of performance. The processing power of the iPhone or iPad is hardly, if at all, equaled by competitors in the smartphone world, and the same will happen with graphics cards.
Apple develops graphics cards for iPhone and iPad
At WWDC 2016, Apple began to provide the first details regarding the graphics cards developed in-house, with higher processing power than those of PowerVR. Moreover, Apple has developed its own drivers for graphics cards, the end result being much better performances than those of standard cards.
"The first is the fixed-function graphics hardware, which is responsible for tasks like processing API commands, triangle rasterization, and raster output. The second is the shader core, which is the heart of the GPU and executes programmable shaders (eg, vertex, geometry, pixel, and compute shaders). Finally, the graphics driver is the software that runs on the CPU and ties everything together, coordinating the activities of the GPU. The driver transforms graphics applications written in the Metal or OpenGL ES APIs into a series of commands for the fixed-function hardware and programmable shaders that execute on the shader cores."
By developing its own graphics cards, Apple will have a major advantage in terms of performance in games offered on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. At the moment, Android smartphones are at a big disadvantage from this point of view, and Apple wants to keep things unchanged with its project to develop its own graphics cards.
