NVIDIA's
first attempt to license its GPU IP to third parties dates back to the year 2013, when the company proposed to license its Kepler GPU IP and thus rival Arm and Imagination Technologies. An effort that, at the time, landed flat on its face. But over a decade later and a fresh effort at hand to license out some of NVIDIA's IP, and it seems NVIDIA has finally succeeded. Altogether, MediaTek's new Dimensity Auto Cockpit system-on-chips will rely on NVIDIA's GPU IP, Drive OS, and CUDA, setting a historical development for both companies.
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MediaTek's family of
next-generation Dimensity Auto Cockpit processors consists of four distinct system-on-chip, including CX-1 for range-topping vehicles, CY-1, CM-1, and CV-1 for entry-level cars. These are highly-integrated SoCs packing Armv9-A-based general-purpose CPU cores as well as NVIDIA's next-generation graphics processing unit IP. NVIDIA's GPU IP can run AI workloads for driver assistance as well as power infotainment system, as it fully supports such graphics technologies like real-time ray-tracing and DLSS 3 image upscaling.
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Without a doubt, licensing graphics IP and platform IP to a third party marks a milestone for NVIDIA in general, as well as its automotive efforts in particular. Leveraging DriveOS and CUDA beyond NVIDIA's own hardware platform is a big deal for a business unit that NVIDIA has long considered poised for significant growth, but has faced stiff competition and a slow adoption rate thanks to conservative automakers. Meanwhile, what remains to be seen is how MediaTek's new Dimensity Auto Cockpit processors will stack up against NVIDIA's own previously announced
Thor SoC and associated
DRIVE Thor platform, which integrates a Blackwell-based GPU delivering 800 TFLOPS of 8-bit floating point AI performance.