Apple GPUs have little to no IMG technology left. You can tell there is some remaining influence in the design, but Apple's is much better and cleaner and what IMG's GPUs should have been.
They still uses PVRTC and are still licensing and paying IMG royalty. Surely if there were little to no IMG tech left Apple could have simply stopped paying them and dont renew the contract. They are not paying substantially less royalty than they were previously either.
What the lawyers do and how the technology actually works are not necessarily related.
The shaders are completely different, the controller is completely different, the command submission structures are different. Sure, it's still a tiled architecture and they probably have to keep PVRTC for compatibility and pay the royalty for that, and you can see some remaining PVR influence in the design. But it's not PVR, and quite possibly has zero actual PVR technology left (as in silicon IP from IMG). They're probably only paying patent royalties.
We know this because we're reverse engineering AGX and IMG just dumped an upstream submission to Mesa and now anyone can compare them. PVR's architecture is, for starters, a lot more insane than Apple's.
