It seems that MediaTek want to follow in the footsteps of Samsung for GPU of its mobile chips and rely on a leading company in their design: the Chinese company would be working with Nvidia, nothing less. The specialized Taiwanese newspaper claims it DigiTimes, citing anonymous inside sources. The SoC in question would naturally be top of the range and could arrive on the market as early as 2024. But it seems that it will simply be the first step of an alliance with very ambitious goals. The duo, again according to the sources, would bet also to the world of notebooks – and more generally of the Windows on ARM initiative.
As we said, Samsung has been a bit of a trailblazer with this strategy: its most recent top-of-the-range Exynos, the 2200 (released last year: this year the company has decided to jump, perhaps it will return as early as 2024) includes a GPU based on AMD’s RDNA architecture. It is very unlikely that the results will be satisfactory immediately with initiatives of this type, and the Exynos 2200 was no exception, but the two companies will continue on their way and it will be very interesting to see how far they can go. It is worth mentioning that even the GPUs of Qualcomm chips are somewhat related to AMD: Adreno is in fact the anagram of Radeon. The technology was developed by ATI, even before its acquisition by AMD, and sold to Qualcomm in 2009.
The current state NVIDIA has several extra gears compared to its historical competitor. Its GPUs include several specialized cores, most notably Tensors for AI operations and RTs for the lighting technique known as ray tracing, which AMD still struggles to tackle. Of course, it will be necessary to understand how all this will be able to relate to the very narrow confines of a mobile chip. However, it is clear that, gaming aside, the AI ​​question is very tempting – and over time it will be increasingly decisive, also for judging the quality of a computer or smartphone.
Although Microsoft was the first to bring to market the idea of ​​a computer equipped with smartphone-like processors, it was Apple that proved that the road is not only viable, but extremely attractive. Intel and AMD didn’t stand by, releasing very convincing x86 chips and with even more interesting promises for the near future.
As for NVIDIA, its growing interest in the mobile market has been clear for years now. The company develops Arm SoCs which have also been quite successful – just think of the amount of Nintendo Switch sold, to which we must add the various products of the SHIELD family – but the attempted acquisition of Arm Holdings a few years ago was already a more than explicit declaration of intent.
