Originally Posted by deleted
I think most people in this thread don't realize that S3 makes the PowerVR series of mobile GPUs. They'll never be making a comeback into the desktop segment. Right now S3 is the king of SoC graphics, along with Qualcomm and their Adreno lineup. Nvidia and ARM are also relevant, if not dominant.
What this means is that HTC will start using their PowerVR IP to differentiate themselves from Apple, Samsung, and the rest. Samsung has been doing fairly well with ARM's Mali 400 for the past generation and a half, so I'm assuming they'll stick with them. LG tends to use Qualcomm and Nvidia SoCs, so they're not particularly interesting here either.
The two big unknowns I see are Motorola (and anyone else that uses TI's OMAP application processors), and Apple. Both relied heavily on PowerVR graphics in the past, and both are direct competitors to HTC. I assume HTC and Motorola will work out some sort of cross licensing agreement, but I'm not sure if Apple will be willing to. If they don't, I'm guessing Apple will start using the same Mali graphics in recent Samsung flagships, or possibly start buying complete Qualcomm SoCs with Adreno graphics. The first option is the one I think is more likely, as well as more interesting.
If Apple does end up going with ARM's GPU, it's going to be going back to the days of the iPhone 4 and Galaxy S, where Apple and Samsung had almost identical hardware, but with very different software to distinguish them. Now that iOS is looking more and more like Android, and TouchWiz is looking more and more like iOS, and Android is rapidly approaching iOS-level smoothness, there really isn't going to be that much separating Samsung from Apple. That's an outcome Apple won't tolerate, so we will be able to count on something big coming from Apple in the near future (much bigger than Siri, which no one uses for more than a day and had already existed in a similar form on both Android and iOS for ages). What this big thing could be, I have no idea, but I'm eager to see.
Of course, this is all just idle speculation, but I do so enjoy speculating.
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