Apple could acquire PowerVR maker to bring GPU design in-house

Later Tuesday, Imagination Technologies said it values Apple "very highly as an important ongoing partner of the company", and said it is confident with its strategy moving forward.

This is a good time for Apple to look into snapping up the company, which has been running into problems this year.

Apple is said to be in "advanced talks" to buy out Imagination Technologies, known for its PowerVR line of GPUs, meaning there may be some big improvements to the power available on future iPhones. Imagination Technologies, for its part, has denied outright that there was any such M&A; plans to begin with.

British tech company Imagination revealed in February that it would be restructuring the business in an effort to cut costs, with the loss-making Pure radio business put up for sale.

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Imagination's acquisition of MIPS Technologies Inc., an already stuttering USA licensor of processor cores, in December 2012 has not produced the turnaround required and if anything validated the comparison of Mali-Cortex from ARM against PowerVR-MIPS from Imagination.

Back in 2008, Apple acquired PA Semi, a fabless chip design company. Earlier in the day the shares had jumped more than 20 percent on the report of interest from Apple, which holds 8.4 percent of the stock, according to Thomson Reuters data. Following that acquisition, Apple's iPhone line of smartphones and iPad line of tablets started sporting SoCs that come with custom CPU cores that are designed in-house.

This isn't the first time Apple has invested in GPUs.