There are multiple angle to this.<p>1) ARM on Windows, That is basically Snapdragon or Samsung Exynos and MediaTek. Nvidia will either have to go alone at the cut throat competitive SoC market, or partner with somebody. All the contender are basing their design on Flagship Mobile Phones, while Nvidia's Tegra are aiming at high margin market with a much lower volume. So it make sense to explore potential partnership with Mediatek if they want that market. And any IP sold to Mediatek targeting ARM on Windows doesn't hurt any of their current revenue source anyway.<p>2) Not seen mentioned anywhere on the net is Nintendo. The next generation of Switch will, or should be compatible with the current Switch. The problem is Nvidia doesn't have any solution. Nor do I believe Nvidia will work with Nintendo like AMD did with PS5 and Xbox on Custom solution. Tegra on Nintendo was merely because Nvidia needed to offload volume for the SOC. But Tegra is no longer in that category with Nvidia is focusing on HPC and AV. It does make sense for Nvidia to license their IP to Mediatek just so that Nintendo could have a new chip. Mediatek are also happy to work with tight margin products. Getting Mediatek on Nintendo should have some other marketing advantage for Mediatek as well.<p>3) ARM is finally hiking price on their GPU IP. Which make sense considering previously it was more like a cheap, subsidise or even freemium model that comes with ARM's CPU. But now ARM need to do another IPO. So things are changing, pricing model are changing. This could just be some PR news Mediatek use in negotiation tactics.
There's like a 1% chance. MediaTek ends up making open source drivers for Nvidia not terrible if this happens. Which is orders of magnitude more likely than Nvidia ever lifting a finger.<p>During the potential ARM acquisition, it was all, "Nvidia would have to shed it's thorny cloak & play with other people! They would transform!" Unlikely they'll ever be more than a Lawful Evil predator, but maybe some partnership like this might spring things loose.<p>That said, people kept holding out hope Intel would eventually make their MID chips with PowerVR gpus (gma500) usable, which would have made PowerVR in general usable. That never happened.