NVIDIA Partners Up With MediaTek; Licenses Out Ampere IP To Create New Gaming SDK

Apart from NVIDIA’s announcement of its Omniverse, its CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang also mentioned that it was expanding its reach to several avenues of the ARM ecosystem, through a series of partnerships and licensing out its technology. Of the lot, one announcement that stood out was its decision to license out the GeForce RTX 30 Series’ Ampere IP to MediaTek.

As Huang briefly stated, the Ampere IP would be paired with the Taiwanese SoC maker’s MT8199x chipset, and be used to create a reference system and SDK for Google’s Chrome OS and Linux-based PCs. It is unclear if this partnership will help NVIDIA re-enter the smartphone market once more, but for now, its partnership with Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Graviton2 CPU is what is expected to drive “Android gaming” to the cloud.

For that matter, NVIDIA’s decision to partner up with a mobile chipset maker isn’t the surprising part; its rival, AMD, already partnered up with Samsung two years prior, with the former promising to license out its RDNA graphics technology to the Korean tech giant’s Exynos chipset. There are even some alleged benchmarks of said chipset’s performance with an AMD GPU, although that still remains verified till now.

What is surprising, though, is NVIDIA’s decision to partner up with a chipmaker like MediaTek. While it has been hailed as the third-largest chip vendor for the third quarter of last year, it has also come under fire in the past for purposely “modifying” its own chipsets, enabling it to cheat in certain benchmarks like UL’s PCMark app.

In any case, Huang did not say when a MediaTek chipset running with NVIDIA’s Ampere GPU technology would be arriving.