MediaTek, Nvidia Confirm Partnership on Arm Chips

At CES this week, MediaTek and Nvidia confirmed rumors that they are partnering on a new generation of Arm chips for PCS. Granted, it’s still early days, so the initial product won’t impact too many people. But big changes are on the way.

That initial product is an Nvidia “AI supercomputer for researchers, data scientists, and students” that retails for $3000 and up and won’t ship until May. Which, yes, doesn’t sound like much of a start when you consider the thin and light Qualcomm Snapdragon X-based laptops we can now choose from. But remember that Snapdragon X came out of Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nuvia, and that the underlying chip architecture was originally designed for compute-intensive datacenter processors, not PCs.

The Nvidia supercomputer, called Project DIGITS, sports a Grace Blackwell Superchip–you gotta love these names–with the latest-generation Nvidia CUDA cores, fifth generation Tensor cores, and NVLink-C2C chip-to-chip connectivity with a “high-performance” Nvidia Grace CPU. And that CPU was “built with the Arm architecture” in collaboration with MediaTek, which Nvidia describes as “a market leader in Arm-based SoC designs.”

The MediaTek/Nvidia Grace CPU features 20 energy-efficient cores, Nvidia notes, and it delivers “best-in-class power efficiency, performance, and connectivity.”

The Nvidia announcement only mentions MediaTek that one time, and the Project DIGITS super computer runs a Linux-based OS called Nvidia DGX. But in subsequent interviews and public statements at CES this week, the firm divulged a few more details about the MediaTek partnership. And this where things get interesting for us who care about Windows 11 on Arm and PCs.

During an investor presentation at CES, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang responded to an analyst’s question about the partnership by confirming that MediaTek will use the Grace CPU architecture in Arm chips for Windows PCs. He also said that the terms of the partnership allowed MediaTek to use that design exclusively or allow Nvidia to market its own PC chips.

“Now they could provide that [chip/design] to us, and they could keep that for themselves and serve the market,” he said. “And so it [the partnership] was a great win-win.”

Regardless, Nvidia will market its own PC chips soon, Huang also confirmed.

“Obviously, we have plans” for that, he said, though he will “wait to tell you” more specifics. “We’re going to make that a mainstream product. We’ll support it with all the things that we do to support professional and high-quality software, and the PC [makers] will make it available to end users.”

This is very exciting, though I wish we had more clarity on the timing. We know that Microsoft and Qualcomm have some kind of exclusivity arrangement for Windows 11 on Arm chips. But we don’t know when it expires. That was supposed to happen at the end of 2024, but more recent rumors claim that it was extended by a year. So we’ll see.

As for MediaTek, it has remained silent so far on its plans for PCs.

In its announcement about the Nvidia partnership, it noted that it is “the world’s number one chip supplier for smartphones, smart TVs, Arm-based Chromebooks, Android tablets, and voice assistant devices (VAD),” a claim I suspect Qualcomm would challenge. But it did admit that it is “investing heavily in AI” and in bringing “Arm-based system-on-a-chip (SoC)” designs to “different platforms.” The company currently markets Arm-based Dimensity chips for phones and tablets and Kompanio chips for Arm-based Chromebooks. Which, by the way, are basically PCs.

It’s happening.