British tech star at war with Apple over iPhone chips

THE row between British tech star Imagination Technologies and Apple is set to intensify after the Silicon Valley titan unveiled the new iPhone model to millions of fans.

Revealing the iPhone X on Tuesday, bosses at Apple boasted their ‘most-powerful’ new A11 Bionic chip – which acts as the phone’s brain – was their first- ever such chip designed in-house.

But the A11 appears to contain some key Imagination technology – setting the stage for a further showdown between the companies after a bitter fall- out.

Imagination made chips for all of Apple’s phones until it was ditched earlier this year and told royalties would be wound down, with Apple deciding to make its own chips.

The loss of its main client sent Imagination’s shares into freefall, wiping £500m off its value and forcing bosses to put the company up for sale.

Hertfordshire-based Imagination has threatened legal action and insisted it would be ‘extremely challenging’ for Apple to design its own chips without using Imagination’s technology somewhere along the line.

Analysts at Numis speculated they do expect Apple to have to pay royalties to Imagination for technology in the new iPhone, despite Apple’s boasts about it being its own work.

Numis said: ’ It is noted on Apple’s developer website that the A11 GPU uses a key Imagination-patented approach called tile-based deferred rendering, which would indicate it will be a royalty-bearing chip.’ Imagination claims Apple admitted to working on its own version of key chip technology while still collaborating with its British partner.

It also emerged Apple poached several staff, including engineers, managers, its chief operation officer, a head of hardware and a leading designer.

Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said on Tuesday that the A11 Bionic chip contained the ‘first-ever Apple-designed GPU’. He added: ‘This is a breakthrough performance in a mobile device. There has never been anything like it.’ All of the new features in the iPhone X were also powered by the Apple- designed chip, Schiller added.

Imagination declined to comment. Apple declined to comment on the new iPhone X but said: ‘We began working with Imagination in 2007 and stopped accepting new IP from them in 2015.

‘After lengthy discussions we advised Imagination on February 9 that we expected to wind down our licensing agreement since we need unique and differentiating IP for our products.’