We knew NVIDIA had some big plans for the mobile market, but the company has announced just how big those plans are to be. NVIDIA will be licensing it’s Kepler GPU architecture and visual computing patents to manufacturers for mobile products.
The PC industry has been slowing down a bit with the rapid adoption of smartphones and tablets, and NVIDIA wants in on the action.
From NVIDIA’s blog post:
“So, our next step is to license our GPU cores and visual computing patent portfolio to device manufacturers to serve the needs of a large piece of the market.”
The post also goes on to mention that this isn’t new for the company, as it licensed its GPU core to Sony in the making of the Playstation 3 and that it’s licensed its visual computing patents to Intel, generating over $250 million a year.
The company is also very confident that this expansion of its business model is exactly where it should be going:
“As the world leader in visual computing technology, we believe we’re uniquely positioned to benefit. We invest more in R&D in this area than any other company in the world – over $1 billion annually and more than $6 billion since our founding. The vast majority of our 8,500 employees are engaged in these efforts, and we have more than 5,500 patents issued and pending – the industry’s best visual computing patent portfolio.”
This is a great step forward for the company and we can only imagine what NVIDIA’s customers will be doing with the Kepler GPU architecture and visual computing patents.
Be sure to hit up NVIDIA’s blog post to get all the nitty-gritty!