Nvidia Will License Its GPUs to Mobile Market

Nvidia’s Tegra SoCs are right up there with the best performing chips in the mobile market but despite this Nvidia is still dominated by Qualcomm and Samsung at the highest end part of the market. Furthermore the underlying CPU and GPU architectures which Nvidia uses to create its Tegra series is actually licensed from ARM, Imagination Technologies and others.

However, this looks set to change as Nvidia now reportedly wants to begin licensing its GPU intellectual property to the mobile market, in the same way ARM and Imagination Technologies do. Essentially Nvidia wants to become a big GPU vendor in the mobile market and it thinks it can do this by licensing its Kepler Architecture to the mobile market, instead of trying to sell people the GPUs directly. This gives buyers of Nvidia’s technology a significant amount more flexibility than they would of had previously and makes it a cheaper solution for them encouraging them to make more widespread use of it.

With DX11, OpenGL 4.3 and GPGPU capabilities, plus a very high level of power efficiency, Nvidia’s Kepler stands a very good competitive chance in the mobile market if Nvidia can present it to potential buyers in the right way.

Nvidia spokesperson David Shannon commented in a blog post that:

 “our next step is to license our GPU cores and visual computing patent portfolio to device manufacturers to serve the needs of a large piece of the market… We’ll start by licensing the GPU core based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the world’s most advanced, most efficient GPU. Its DX11, OpenGL 4.3, and GPGPU capabilities, along with vastly superior performance and efficiency, create a new class of licensable GPU cores. Through our efforts designing Tegra into mobile devices, we’ve gained valuable experience designing for the smallest power envelopes. As a result, Kepler can operate in a half-watt power envelope, making it scalable from smartphones to supercomputers.”

Image courtesy of Nvidia