Since the first iPhone was launched, Imagination's PowerVR series GPU has been growing together with the iPhone/iPad. This British company has provided powerful GPU chips for each generation of iPhone/iPad, making the performance of Apple's mobile phone GPU a benchmark in the industry.

In April this year, Apple announced that it would gradually stop using the GPU chips developed and designed by Imagination and develop its own GPU chips. Now, the world's top British GPU company has been formally acquired by Kaiqiao Capital (China Private Investment Fund) at a price of 550 million pounds (about 4.9 billion yuan).

According to the news from Reuters, although Kaiqiao Capital is headquartered in Silicon Valley of the United States its Main capital source Chinese politics House Kaiqiao Capital also participated in China's space program. At the beginning of September 2017, Kaiqiao Capital tried to acquire Apple parts supplier Lattice Semiconductor at a price of US $1.3 billion, but was finally rejected by Trump on the grounds of national security.

In the field of mobile chips, the GPU market can be said to be a tripartite confrontation. Qualcomm adopts its own Adreno series GPU Samsung, MediaTek, Huawei, Spreadtrum, Lianxin, etc. are all provided by ARM Mali series GPU chip Before Apple A11 Bionic, Apple had always used Imagination to provide PowerVR series GPU 。

Although Kaiqiao Capital said that it would not transfer the business of Imagination to China after the acquisition, and would continue to increase talent investment in the UK for the development of Imagination, this acquisition is of great significance to the development of domestic mobile chip business. Although the domestic mobile chip field has developed in recent years, it is almost completely blank in GPU, Whether it is high-end Huawei Kirin chips, or low-end Spreadtrum and Lianxin, they all use the Mali GPU provided by ARM.