The big picture: MediaTek, a native Taiwanese company, is the least known of all the major semiconductor vendors that presented at Computex 2024, but like the country itself, their influence is significantly larger than it may first appear. As the top provider of chips for consumer electronics such as smart TVs, Amazon Alexa devices, and much more. They also happen to ship more chips for smartphones than any company in the world.
The approach most big companies take for keynote presentations at tech events is to provide a bit of context and strategy and then dive deep into the inevitable flurry of new product introductions.
Sometimes, however, organizations use the opportunity to talk more about partnerships and overall capabilities than specific products. MediaTek's Rick Tsai followed the latter approach and provided an appropriately Taiwanese book end to this historic slate of Computex presentations this year.
Leveraging their influence and heritage in the mobile market, Tsai spent a fair amount of time talking about the capabilities of their Dimensity smartphone SoCs, including their latest Dimensity 9300+ which was released about a month ago. He showed several demos of on-device AI capabilities for things like image generation, using the NPU that's built into the Dimensity chips.
Though the company did not talk about 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 their own keynotes earlier in the conference, 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.
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 tying it all together.
The conversation between Haas and Tsai focused 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.
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 discussion about potential future collaborations in creating cloud GenAI accelerator products using both companies' intellectual property.
As the week of keynotes comes to an end, I'm happy to say it's 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 Bob on Twitter @bobodtech
MediaTek surprises with powerful partnerships at Computex 2024
