MediaTek rumored to integrate Nvidia AI GPU in upcoming flagship smartphone SoC

AI is shaping up to be a great catalyst for many businesses, including Nvidia as of recent. Team Green has been having some financial troubles throughout 2022, but the company is hoping to turn things around by adapting more of its hardware solutions to boost AI computational power. This new strategy would primarily impact Nvidia’s datacenter and cloud-based offerings, but it may also trickle down to consumer products like gaming GPUs. PC users can already experiment with the AI inference power offered by the Tensor cores integrated in the GeForce RTX GPUs from the past few generations, yet it looks like smartphone users may soon be able to benefit from similar technologies, as industry sources close to DigiTimes suggest that Nvidia’s AI GPUs could be integrated in MediaTek’s 2024 flagship mobile SoCs.

This would be a great opportunity to prove that established desktop GPU architectures can also be adapted to smartphone SoCs. AMD and Samsung tried a similar feat with the Exynos 2200 SoC that integrates an RDNA 2 GPU, but performance was underwhelming compared to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Apple’s Bionic implementations. It remains to be seen if Nvidia can tweak an architecture as intricate as Ada Lovelace and miniaturize it to provide any meaningful performance gains over competing solutions.

Apart from the GPU side of things, the MediaTek SoC would also benefit from boosted AI performance. Right now, MediaTek’s AI implementation in the flagship Dimensity 9200 is lagging behind the that offered by Qualcomm with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. If MediaTek manages to get even the slightest performance edge over Qualcomm’s flagship solutions, more smartphone brands would find it more attractive to use the Dimensity SoCs, helping MediaTek conquer the premium sector, as well.

DigiTimes notes that MediaTek denied such rumors, although they do not seem so outlandish considering the fact that MediaTek has already paired Nvidia’s GPUs with some Arm-based SoCs designed for Chromebooks.

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