NVIDIA announced today that it is investing $3.5 billion in MediaTek and adding new layers of collaboration between the two silicon giants. It’s important to note that NVIDIA and MediaTek are already working together, as MediaTek designed an SoC called GB10 that powers NVIDIA’s RTX Spark consumer products and DGX Spark mini workstations. Both companies have confirmed that they will be approaching the collaboration through NVIDIA’s NVLink Fusion ecosystem. NVLink Fusion serves as an IP and chiplet framework that allows non-NVIDIA processors and accelerators to become key participants in the company’s data center fabric.
MediaTek will offer the NVLink Fusion platform to its customers, which include numerous ASIC clients like Google, enabling them to connect their XPUs to the NVLink Fusion scale-up fabric using photonic or classical copper interconnects. This includes the NVLink-C2C high-bandwidth fabric, which can connect multiple nearby XPUs and is also used in the upcoming NVIDIA “Rosa” CPUs. Additionally, MediaTek will offer customers NVIDIA’s newly announced NVHBM, which integrates the controller into the 3D HBM stack, significantly enhancing performance and efficiency. Compared to standard HBM4E, NVIDIA claims up to 30% more memory bandwidth, 15% lower HBM power consumption, and up to 25% more usable compute die area on the processing unit.
This collaboration is also interesting because customers can hand off the entire ASIC design and manufacturing process to MediaTek, which will use NVIDIA and NVLink technologies for connectivity, memory architecture, packaging, manufacturing, and rack-scale technologies to expedite the accelerator’s development. Shorter design cycles will lead to faster prototypes and production runs, and customers can even bring their own XPU designs to MediaTek to integrate with NVLink Fusion technologies. Meanwhile, NVIDIA has purchased $3.5 billion worth of convertible bonds issued by MediaTek, which could later become a significant equity share if converted.
https://www.techpowerup.com/352174/nvidia-invests-usd-3-5-billion-in-mediatek-partners-on-nvlink-fusion?amp
