It's a small enough group that I'm likely personally identifiable anyway, so will be vague and try to stick to public info and my personal conjecture.
Let's just say that the legal shenanigans of the time caused me to lose my job (part of the sale of Imagination Technologies required closing some countries offices to avoid more interference from various regulatory bodies). Judge bias accordingly.
And all their noise about "Ground up redesign using no PowerVR tech" kinda conflicts with them still to this day paying for an architecture license - the very thing that they claimed they would be dropping in their press release that caused the imagination technologies share crash and corresponding sale. And this is without even going to court - they issued a press release then immediately relented (and have continued to relent for over 5 years now) at the slightest question. And then scrubbed all mention of that press release.
My general suspicion is apple intended to game the market by intentionally dropping the share price and simply purchase PowerVR at a discount - but in the process pissed off enough people that they rejected the offer, even if it was "better" in terms of value. Or just let them go under and pick everything they want off the resulting fire sale - I heard rumors that apple had already put in an offer to purchase the company that was rejected, and under UK regulation a failed takeover attempt can't be re-attempted for some time, that much of this happened within (again, according to fuzzy scuttlebutt, nothing definite)
That or the legal/C-suite of apple don't actually speak to the engineers of apple anymore - they honestly thought that it was a completely ground-up design that didn't derive anything from PowerVR tech, and just send out the press release thinking "Why are we paying for this??" - then the engineers shuffled in saying that actually they couldn't put together anything better that wasn't a direct derivative, and their noise about a completely internally designed-from-scratch apple GPU was a bit of a stretch.
Let's just say that the legal shenanigans of the time caused me to lose my job (part of the sale of Imagination Technologies required closing some countries offices to avoid more interference from various regulatory bodies). Judge bias accordingly.
And all their noise about "Ground up redesign using no PowerVR tech" kinda conflicts with them still to this day paying for an architecture license - the very thing that they claimed they would be dropping in their press release that caused the imagination technologies share crash and corresponding sale. And this is without even going to court - they issued a press release then immediately relented (and have continued to relent for over 5 years now) at the slightest question. And then scrubbed all mention of that press release.
My general suspicion is apple intended to game the market by intentionally dropping the share price and simply purchase PowerVR at a discount - but in the process pissed off enough people that they rejected the offer, even if it was "better" in terms of value. Or just let them go under and pick everything they want off the resulting fire sale - I heard rumors that apple had already put in an offer to purchase the company that was rejected, and under UK regulation a failed takeover attempt can't be re-attempted for some time, that much of this happened within (again, according to fuzzy scuttlebutt, nothing definite)
That or the legal/C-suite of apple don't actually speak to the engineers of apple anymore - they honestly thought that it was a completely ground-up design that didn't derive anything from PowerVR tech, and just send out the press release thinking "Why are we paying for this??" - then the engineers shuffled in saying that actually they couldn't put together anything better that wasn't a direct derivative, and their noise about a completely internally designed-from-scratch apple GPU was a bit of a stretch.