MediaTek Said To Be Licensing AMD Graphics Technology

Taiwanese SoC manufacturer MediaTek is said to be licensing AMD graphics technology for use in future high-end ARM SoC designs.

Talk from Mobile World Congress last week in Barcelona is that AMD and MediaTek have teamed up to work on mobile SoC graphics. Ultra low-power AMD graphics in a MediaTek SoC would presumably give them a hefty advantage over the other high-end SoCs out there just licensing ARM Mali or Imagination PowerVR tech and could better deliver Qualcomm Adreno -- which in turn are far-derived by AMD/ATI via Qualcomm's Imageon acquisition over a half-decade ago -- and NVIDIA Tegra class graphics.

Besides delivering faster graphics, this move would help out MediaTek with their HSA/GPGPU offerings too as MediaTek is one of the founding members alongside AMD on the HSA Foundation.

Assuming everything pans out, it will be interesting to see what happens from a driver perspective whether MediaTek would make use at all of the open-source Linux graphics stack with the Radeon Gallium3D driver working on Android or if they'd go for Catalyst or some other route.

AMD nor MediaTek has officially announced any partnership or licensing agreement, but you can read a bit more about the Mobile World Congress chatter on this topic via our friends at Fudzilla.