When Canyon Bridge Partners, which is owned by China Reforma Chinese state-owned investment fund, sought to buy Imagination Technologies in 2017, Theresa May's government approved the acquisition on the basis that Canyon Bridge was licensed and regulated by US law. When the Trump administration blocked Canyon Bridge’s attempted acquisition of Lattice Semiconductor in September 2017, Canyon Bridge moved its headquarters … Read more
Canyon Bridge violated the deal
Imagination Technologies announced that the fabless semiconductor company UNISOC has licensed Imagination’s latest generation of neural-network accelerator (NNA)
Ranging from semi-custom to mass market
Imagination Technologies is on its fourth CEO in three years, is in the process of losing its major customer, and is still dealing with the aftermath of the disastrous acquisition and subsequent fire-sale disposal of MIPS. A job like that seems nearer the nightmare than the dream job end of the spectrum so I took advantage of the whole world … Read more
Seeing an opportunity to develop a chip company using Imagination IP and not wanting to do it as a spin-off because it would annoy their customers, Imagination’s CEO Leo Li decided he would launch a company to do it independently. As a result, the company now has a new CEO, Ron Black, ex Rambus. Ron Black, new CEO of Imagination … Read more
Arm chose this year’s IEEE Hot Chips Symposium to show off their first-generation Machine Learning Processor claiming a design that delivers ‘massive’ efficiency improvements over GPU, CPU, or DSP implementations as well as the ability to scale from IoT to server applications. Being an English design, it probably serves tea in a porcelain cup, as well. Leaving aside the issue … Read more
The revolving doors in Silicon Valley are nothing new, but within the last two or so years the migration at the superstar techno level has been particularly intense—especially in the GPU and CPU space. Some recent examples: Martin Ashton served as EVP of PowerVR Multimedia IP at Imagination Technologies Group Plc until December 1, 2016 where he was instrumental in … Read more
Sends a strong message about the company’s future. Imagination Technologies announced this week that Dr. Leo Li will be the company’s Chief Executive Officer. That is very good news for Imagination, its suppliers, shareholders, employees, and friends. Dr. Li is Chairman of the Global Semiconductor Alliance and a well-known and respected figure in the semiconductor industry. He has over 30 … Read more
New NNA steps up to compete in ML Citing the burgeoning intelligent vision market, Imagination Technologies announced on September 21st that it has joined the ever-growing list of companies with hardware acceleration for deep learning. Up to now, they have relied on their PowerVR GPUs running in GPU compute mode to provide an ad hoc solution for inferencing but with … Read more
