Nvidia is entering into the patent licensing business with full force. The chipmaker’s Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang said that his company will start licensing its graphics technology to other companies.
The announcement can on Tuesday at Reuters Global Technology Summit in San Francisco. The new move can give Nvidia access to markets that were previously been hard to enter with its own silicon. This was also evident in Huang’s comment: “The bottom line is the world has changed and we’re expanding our business model to serve markets that we historically could not serve by selling chips alone.”
Nvidia has been struggling to keep up its profit margins as the demand for its GPUs are declining with the shrinking PC market. In the mobile market, its Tegra chips are also facing strong competition from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors.
Nvidia’s new licensing business would put the company in direct competition with ARM and Imaginations Technologies which don’t make chips, but license their technologies.
“We will target customers where their capacity and desire to build their own application processors is great,” said Huang. These target customers include Apple, Samsung and other device makers.
Nvidia will first license its Kepler-based GPU cores. The licensees will receive all necessary designs, collateral and support to integrate NVIDIA’s powerful graphics cores into their devices,” the company noted.
Source: Reuters
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