NVIDIA and MediaTek are working together on in-vehicle system processors

At the Computex 2023 event, NVIDIA and MediaTek announced a joint venture targeting vehicular system processors, incorporating MediaTek’s tailored processors with NVIDIA’s GPU design to foster diverse vehicular applications.

Previously, NVIDIA partnered with MediaTek to launch a Kompanio 1200 (MT8195) processor for Chromebooks, featuring a GeForce RTX 3060 GPU capable of real-time ray tracing and DLSS display effects. Many speculated that this collaboration would primarily focus on always-connected processors designed for Windows on Arm.

However, the emphasis of this collaboration has been placed on vehicular system processors, offering an integrated GPU design in chiplet form. NVIDIA aspires to delve into diverse application requirements in the vehicular market, enhancing its primary focus on vehicle safety assistance and entertainment systems to further upgrade autonomous driving functionalities through collaboration with MediaTek. This partnership will also attract more automotive manufacturers to use MediaTek’s design solutions.

“NVIDIA is a world-renowned pioneer and industry leader in AI and computing. With this partnership, our collaborative vision is to provide a global one-stop shop for the automotive industry, designing the next generation of intelligent, always-connected vehicles,” said MediaTek CEO Rick Tsai. “Through this special collaboration with NVIDIA, we will together be able to offer a truly unique platform for the compute-intensive, software-defined vehicle of the future.”

“AI and accelerated computing are fueling the transformation of the entire auto industry,” said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. “The combination of MediaTek’s industry-leading system-on-chip plus NVIDIA’s GPU and AI software technologies will enable new user experiences, enhanced safety and new connected services for all vehicle segments, from luxury to entry-level.”

NVIDIA’s collaboration with MediaTek’s 3nm process Dimensity Auto vehicular processor is not exclusive, thereby paving the way for potential cooperation with other chip companies interested in the vehicular market layout, such as Qualcomm and Samsung, to expand the scale of intelligent vehicle product development.

On the other hand, this collaborative model allows NVIDIA to devote more resources to advanced and fully autonomous driving technology development, integrating more applications proposed by other companies for vehicle safety assistance and entertainment systems, and providing automotive manufacturers with a plethora of solution options.

Nevertheless, at present, NVIDIA has not planned to follow the cooperative model of AMD and Samsung by using its GPU for mobile processors created by other chip companies, thus re-entering the mobile phone market. The primary focus is on diversifying the vehicular system market.