The company will also offer licensing rights to its visual computing portfolio

Jun 19, 2013 07:03 GMT  ·  By

NVIDIA is certainly not a newcomer on the smartphone market, but its technology in this flourishing area is rather old in comparison with that of its main rival Qualcomm.

But this is about to change as NVIDIA has just decided to start licensing its newest technology in the GPU architecture to other companies in the smartphone and tablets market.

“We’ll start by licensing the GPU core based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the world’s most advanced, most efficient GPU. Its DX11, OpenGL 4.3, and GPGPU capabilities, along with vastly superior performance and efficiency, create a new class of licensable GPU cores.”

According to the company, the new Kepler architecture “can operate in a half-watt power envelope, making it scalable from smartphones to supercomputers.”

For those unfamiliar with NVIDIA’s latest products, Kepler is the basis for currently shipping GeForce, Quadro and Tesla GPUs, as well as the company’s newest Tegra mobile processor, which is dubbed Logan.

Aside from offering smartphone makers the possibility to license its Kepler architecture, NVIDIA has confirmed that it will also offer licensing rights to its visual computing portfolio, thus enabling them the option to design their own GPU functionality.

There’s more to it, as the company has announced that all licensees will get “all necessary designs, collateral and support to integrate NVIDIA’s powerful graphics cores into their devices.”

It will be interesting to see how many smartphone and tablet makers will take advantage of NVIDIA’s offer and license the GPU core in the Kepler graphics processing unit.

The announcement is proof that NVIDIA has no plans of withdrawing from the smartphone market, on the contrary. That being said, we can expect Qualcomm to react in the next few months, but that can only be a good thing for consumers. We will update this post as we get more info, so stay tuned.