NVIDIA And MediaTek May Team Up For A Powerful 3nm AI PC Chip Challenger
Move over AMD, Intel, and especially Qualcomm, and make room for MediaTek, which is rumored to be making a serious move into the PC space with an intriguing AI chip collaboration with NVIDIA. While nothing has been officially announced yet, it's notable that NVIDIA and MediaTek have teamed up before—NVIDIA's DRIVE technology is integrated in MediaTek's Dimensity Auto platform.
That may have been a precursor of things to come. According to a report by IT Home, not only are MediaTek and NVIDIA working together on a new AI chip for the PC platform, but it's "ready to be taped out this month" with mass production of the 3-nanometer part scheduled for the second half of 2025. If true, this is interesting on a number of levels.
For one, it would be another Arm-based challenger to x86's dominance in the PC space, the latter of which is served by AMD and Intel. The first real challenger in the AI era came in the form of Snapdragon X (Elite and Plus), with Qualcomm scoring a deal with Microsoft to power the first wave of Copilot+ branded laptops. The twofold allure of Snapdragon X boils down to its AI chops, which is primarily powered by an onboard neural processing unit (NPU), and battery life.
The latest x86 silicon, as well as future chips from AMD and Intel, also sport dedicated NPUs to handle AI workloads. As such, Microsoft last month announced that its Copilot+ PC initiative was expanding to include x86 chips such as AMD's Ryzen AI 300 and Intel's Core Ultra 200V series processors, all of which meet the minimum requirement of having an NPU capable of least 40 TOPS (trillion operations per second).
It's still early and it remains to be seen if Arm-based solutions can make a dent in x86's dominance. Qualcomm aims to find out, with plans of expanding into desktop PCs, while MediaTek and NVIDIA are apparently making a spirited move to power AI PCs as well (likely laptops at first).
According to the report, the custom 3nm AI PC chip will be paired with an NVIDIA GPU. That could be an interesting combo, though naturally it will come down to the balance of performance (AI, general purpose,and graphics), battery life, and pricing.
Though much is unknown, there appears to be some excitement within the OEM space—it's said that ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and other players are all on board to leveraging the upcoming chip. The timing is interesting too, as it comes on the heels of MediaTek announcing its Dimensity 9400 chip for mobile devices, which is surprisingly powerful—an earlier leak claimed it was the first chip to achieve 3 million points in AnTuTu, and the final specifications revealed earlier this week look stout.
It also follows an earlier rumor suggesting that MediaTek might launch a gaming handheld with an NVIDIA GPU inside. So whether the two firms have multiple projects in the works or leakers are conflating the two, it sure seems like something is afoot.
