Boosting the bottom line
As King-Smith made clear, I was never going to get any specifics on the relationship between Imagination and Apple from him - and knowing how wrathful Apple can get about leaks I don't blame him - but it's reasonable to assume that Apple is by far Imagination's biggest customer right now.
Take a look at some of these charts from Imagination's recent annual results. The company has entered an exponential phase when it comes to the number of SoCs shipped containing its designs, with the second chart revealing the extent of Imagination's ambitions.
This is reflected in the major increases in Imagination's annual profits, and the proportion of its revenue derived from royalties, as opposed to one-off licensing payments.
But, I suggested, isn't it dangerous for Imagination to have so many of its eggs in one basket? What if Apple decided to get its SoC GPUs somewhere else, or even design them itself? "The Apple offering is for everything to be integrated. In principle they could design out us and ARM - just look at Macs and Intel," said King-Smith.
He thinks the benefits Apple gets from Imagination's designs, coupled with the extent of its existing investment, make that very unlikely. "The beauty of the license model is that we can amortise R&D over several customers," said King-Smith. "When you integrate technologies like this you become very interdependent. There's a lot of reliance on the way PowerVR works - it's not as simple as just dropping in a Mali, or whatever."
Fair point, but that didn't stop Samsung doing just that when it used ARM's Mali GPU in the Exynos SoC found in the Galaxy S II, having used a PowerVR design in the preceding Hummingbird chip.