Several years of fighting between Intel and Apple over the future of chip designer Imagination Technologies has ended with Intel giving up.

Intel, who is Imagination’s biggest shareholder, announced it was selling overnight a 9 per cent stake in the company held by its venture capital arm. The sale will cut Intel’s holding in Imagination to about 4 per cent. It was not as if Imagination was doing badly. The company announced that it was making a fortune in new licensing deals both for smartphones and new products.

In fact is probably because Imagination is doing so well that Intel felt it was safe to off-load the shares. The shareprice was double what Intel paid for it and the chipmaker was laughing all the way to the bank having lost nothing on the deal. The US chipmaker had built its stake in 2009 as an apparent move to block potential bids from rivals such as Apple, Imagination’s biggest customer, which still has an 8.6 per cent holding.

Intel made it clear that it continues to have a business relationship with the company, having licensed several generations of Imagination Technologies' graphics and video processing cores.