The Six Five team discusses NVIDIA & MediaTek Getting Into AI PCs?
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: There’s a rumor going out there, Tom’s Hardware wrote an article about potential for Nvidia and MediaTek getting into AI PCs. Now first off, Nvidia is already in the PC ecosystem with the form of GPUs for notebooks and for desktops, workstations. But what this is is the Copilot+ space for Windows. I do believe this has absolutely true, this has not been substantiated by either Nvidia or MediaTek. MediaTek did say that they were working on something, but with no details out there.
How could this stack up? First of all, a little murky on whether it’s Nvidia plus MediaTek only or where it’s a Nvidia and MediaTek and a MediaTek solution. But here’s how I can see this playing out. I can see Nvidia targeting, first of all, a huge GPU, okay. All day battery life gaming, all day battery life workstation, ’cause today if you want to do gaming and workstation, aside from the casual stuff, this thing lights up like a Christmas tree. It’s sucking an inordinate amount of power, has a power brick bigger than my head and ego it’s gigantic. But if you can tightly couple CPU, GPU memory, NPU together, you can do some amazing stuff. I do believe that there is an industry effort afoot to attack these two markets differently. And let’s just say it would be a MediaTek plus Nvidia combo. You could have the SOC aggregator as MediaTek. They’re pretty good at that by the way. They crank out a ton for smartphones and tablets and on the MediaTek side, just doing more of a vanilla with a lot of ARM IP in there, an ARM GPU, pretty much an entire ARM solution could be a lower end.
And it’s interesting, if we dial back, what would that mean? That would mean that there could be four, maybe five different solutions for the Windows Copilot+ a market, and it’s interesting, I talked to an OEM who will remain nameless and I’m like, “How on earth is the industry going to support all of these?” He said, “Pat, I don’t care how it ends up. I’m just glad to have more than one player out there, which is what I had for years.” And my final comment, thing that I’m thinking through is, is there enough, there’s 300 million units out there in the market, 250, how do five players, how can they afford to be out there, right. The OEM certainly can’t afford to do designs from everybody, so they’re going to have to pick different types of platforms. So I think it could be a very bloody second half ’25 and ’26 as AMD, Intel, Qualcomm, MediaTek and Nvidia are banging each other in the head. Now, there are different segments, but the question is do those segments, are they profitable enough? And I think the people who will win in the end are the ones that can leverage IP and leverage designs of what they were doing somewhere else and then coming up with a complete solution.
Daniel Newman: So do you think, just want to double click on something you said. Do you think there’s a Nvidia MediaTek kind of combo and then there’s an all in Nvidia coming later, or how do you rationalize that?
Patrick Moorhead: Well, Nvidia branded, but with overall SOC design from MediaTek, could be the combo. You’ve got a giant Nvidia GPU with tensor cores in there like an NPU, right. But might be called a tensor NPU or something like that. So it’s like a collaboration.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, that’s how I saw it too. I was just making sure I understood ’cause it really becomes kind of four bigger options. I guess you could sort of see how this could splinter even into five at some point. But it’s interesting Pat, you start doing the number crunching and you see a situation in which all the biggest players could actually lose share and the market could grow.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Daniel Newman: It’s really interesting ’cause I don’t think we’ve seen an inflection like this in a long time. I mean, the Qualcomm Wrinkle is already there and it’s already interesting. I think the biggest winner of this is ARM, if I had to give a winner in this because they’re going to now have two very competitive players in the market using ARM IP in a 300 million type volume where they’re going to start taking share. Now, Renee talked about like in five years or three years, 50%, I think he threw a number, I don’t remember the exact quote, but 50% of the AI PCs will be ARM-based. I think this was in the back of his mind when he was giving this number. It’s not that Qualcomm is not going to take some share. They’ve done a good job. I mean, I’m on a Qualcomm device right now as we’re doing this.
Patrick Moorhead: Me too.
Daniel Newman: So this is not a indictment in any way of what Qualcomm is doing. It’s just to make a meaningful change in this market. There’s going to need to be a lot of blunt force. And it’s funny, but I think Nvidia has a lot of power. We talked about this in the last one, but Pat, I mean, look at companies that need other Nvidia stuff. By the way, like I said, this is not a sort of indictment, but how could they kind of bundle together people’s demand for one thing to push that people are going to buy the other thing? I hope they wouldn’t do that. But you kind of see how that can play out. I had a few comments yesterday about Satya getting on stage with AMD and people saying, “Well, I guess they’re not going to get any more Nvidia.” It’s like that’s the perception though in the market right now, the loose sentiment in the market, which is super interesting.
But as I see it, I mean you could see how this would be very powerful and they could probably really accomplish something that has both that AI PC functionality and gaming, because that’s something that Nvidia really knows how to do and could sort of lean into both without so much compromise. I don’t know on the sort of, where I still see the strongest market case right now near term for AI PCs are these lightweight white collar enterprise, you know, I’m on the road traveling. What I like about my device is I go four or five days without having to worry about plugging it in. That’s kind of the big shift so far. We’re still dealing with feature creep. Is there enough feature in the new devices that would really make an average worker average company go out and buy all these and replace all these? Lisa Su said it well yesterday when she’s talking about, really, you said this too, “Future proofing.” It’s not so much about knowing what you’re going to do with it now, it’s about what you might do with it in the future.
So that’s another kind of interesting thing. But, Pat, we knew this was happening. Like I said, I’ll leave it to… I don’t know how much weight the MediaTek part plays in all of this. I mean, I think over in Asia they have a lot more clout than they do here domestically. But I do think putting an NVIDIA badge on a device right now at the absolute peak Nvidia insanity could create some definite demand pull. And of course, like I said, there’s a little bit of a debate still. I think you hear this too, about kind of NPU versus GPU. And of course if they can, like you said, using tensor cores kind of create and make the GPU still a little bit more of the center. A lot of stuff still on, like, the NPU can only do so much, and that’s why there’s a lot of debate about how really impactful is 45 versus 48 versus 50 versus if more efficient GPU could do a lot of these things too. So these are all-
Patrick Moorhead: Those are great points. I do want to close this out just by saying Nvidia created AI on the desktop and on the laptop, and they did it on a GPU, and there are hundreds of applications that leverage it already. I just want to make that clear. The only thing we’re debating here is an integrated SOC that gets the Copilot+ stamp out there.
