TECHnalysis Research Blog

June 5, 2024
Computex Chronicles Part 6: MediaTek Highlights Its Hidden Connections

By Bob O'Donnell

The typical approach big companies take for keynote presentations at major tech events is to provide a bit of context and strategy and then dive deep into the inevitable flurry of new product introductions that they include. Sometimes, however, organizations use the opportunity to talk more about partnerships and overall capabilities than specific products.

For the 6th CEO keynote here—and the final chapter of this Computex Chronicles series, MediaTek’s Rick Tsai followed the latter approach and provided an appropriately Taiwanese book end to this historic slate of presentations. A native Taiwanese company, MediaTek is the least known of all the major semiconductor vendors that presented at Computex, but like the country itself, their influence is significantly larger than it may first appear. The company is the top provider of chips for consumer electronics such as smart TVs, Amazon Alexa-based smart home devices, and much more. It also ships more chips for smartphones than any company in the world.

Leveraging that smartphone influence and heritage, Tsai spent a fair amount of time talking about the capabilities of their Dimensity line of smartphone SOCs, including their latest Dimensity 9300+ which was released about a month ago. He incorporated several demos that highlighted the on-device AI capabilities of the devices for things like image generation, using the NPU that’s built into the Dimensity chips. Though the company did not talk about an AI PC applications, Tsai did make the point that the NPU performance of the 9300+ in smartphones was higher than the TOPs requirements for Copilot+ PCs.

Tsai also discussed the company’s little-known but impressive capabilities across an array of essential technologies including compute, wireless connectivity, high-speed SERDES (Serialization-Deserialization—a critical technology for applications such as interconnect across datacenter GPUs) and more.

The most intriguing parts of the presentation, however, were when he brought out CEOs from two of their key partners—Rene Haas from Arm and Jensen Huang from Nvidia—to chat with him onstage. Both of them had presented keynotes earlier in the conference (the Jensen Huang Nvidia keynote was covered in Part 1 of this Computex Chronicles series and the Renee Haas Arm keynote was covered in Part 3). Though no specific product news came out of the onstage banter, it was still interesting to hear the discussions from a long-term strategic industry perspective. (MediaTek press releases after the presentation announced that MediaTek was joining Arm's Total Design initiative to help meet the requirements for future AI datacenter products and that Nvidia and MediaTek were working on a project combining Nvidia's TAO Tookit and MediaTek's Neuropilot SDK for future GenAI-powered IoT applications, but neither announcement was discussed in the keynote.)

More than anything, seeing and hearing about the partnerships highlighted in a visceral way the interconnectedness of the tech industry and semiconductor supply chain. While that’s something that many people understand intellectually, the appearances together of these leading tech CEOs did provide an interesting and somehow very appropriate way of tieing it all together.

The conversation between Haas and Tsai focused more on the long-term partnership between the companies and hinted at the depth of interactions between them. MediaTek is one of Arm’s largest customers and has a long history of bringing Arm’s latest technologies to market sooner than anyone, so it made complete sense to highlight the connection between the two companies.

In the case of Nvidia’s Huang, the conversation covered a broader range of topics. They started with the two companies previously announced collaboration in the automotive space—where MediaTek provides the digital cockpit functionality and Nvidia the ADAS portion—and then moved onto a very interesting discussion about potential future collaborations in creating cloud-based GenAI accelerator products using both companies’ IP (intellectual property). While no details of any kind were shared, it’s not difficult to speculate that there will be some intriguing new developments between the two companies in this red-hot area over the next year or so.

As this series comes to an end, I’m happy to say it has proven to be the incredibly information-packed adventure I thought and hoped it would be. There may not be another Computex or other major tech event with this kind of speaker lineup in quite some time, so I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to document it. I hope you enjoyed it.

Bob O’Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on LinkedIn at Bob O’Donnell or on Twitter @bobodtech.