With a $100m (£62m) cash offer, Imagination Technologies (IMG) appears to have finally seen off the challenge from US-based Ceva to land MIPS. Imagination, which designs GPUs (graphics processor units), originally offered $60m for MIPS's CPU (central processing unit) business and patents, but rival offers from Ceva forced the bidding up.
Imagination, whose GPU designs are used in Apple's iPhone, has long been keen to extend its presence in the CPU space. Arm (ARM) and Qualcomm (QCOM), two main rivals, both have CPUs and GPUs as part of their portfolios, and integrating the two can increase margins.
MIPS also offers Imagination a way to extend its presence in Android, the main rival mobile operating system to Apple. Moreover, a wide range of electronics devices, such as blu-ray players, digital TVs and games consoles, use CPU architecture from MIPS. Even so, the US company made a pre-tax loss of $9m on revenue of $60m in the year ended June.
