MediaTek Might Integrate NVIDIA GPUs Into Next-Gen Mobile Chips To Battle Snapdragon
Supply chain sources in Taiwan have indicated that NVIDIA and MediaTek are going to snuggle-up to produce premium mobile SoCs. The plan may be to give MediaTek's products a graphical and AI processing uplift, allowing the firm to better compete with the likes of Qualcomm and Samsung in the flagship mobile and mid to high-end Windows On Arm (WOA) laptop segments. We think NVIDIA brand recognition will also lure in some customers for MediaTek.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors may currently appear to have an unassailable lead in the flagship smartphone and premium WOA laptop markets. Moreover, the chip designer isn't letting up on the development of new and improved Oryon CPU cores (with team Nuvia on the case), its Adreno GPU, and various other key SoC components like image signal processors (ISPs), digital signal processors (DSPs), and so on.
Samsung also quite recently updated its agreement with AMD Radeon to infuse upcoming Exynos mobile SoCs with RDNA 3 graphics. Its Xclipse 920 GPU based on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture was somewhat underwhelming, probably due to the power curve the architecture was optimized for. We really hope the RDNA 3 Exynos chips will make a bigger splash.
Circling back to the news du jour concerning MediaTek and NVIDIA, and Taiwan's DigiTimes says that the first collaborative SoC could surface as soon as 2024. Perhaps the pairing have already been working on this project for quite some time.
With the stiff competition from Qualcomm and Samsung outlined above, the NVIDIA partnership could be important for MediaTek and its Dimensity SoCs. It is implied by the source that green team IP will replace the Arm Immortalis series GPUs and allow MediaTek to hunt higher bounties in the flagship mobile and premium WOA and Chromebook markets, where it might have otherwise floundered.
