A few days ago, Nvidia and MediaTek reported news that they plan to ride the AI boom and release new Arm-based chips for laptop PCs designed to compete with everything from traditional Intel and AMD Apus to the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. Well, now there are rumors that Nvidia and MediaTek are cooking chips specifically designed for handheld gaming PCs.

Potentially, this is epic news. There is absolutely no doubt that the Arm instruction set will be a more efficient chip. Some recent leaked data from Dell shows that a new laptop with an Arm-based Qualcomm X Plus chip will almost double the battery life of the traditional x86 equivalent.

Arguably, one of the weakest aspects of the current gaming handheld is the poor battery life.1 At the same time, Nvidia graphics can't currently go beyond the og Nintendo Switch into a handheld. Therefore, the prospects for Arm-based efficiency and Nvidia graphics in the handheld are quite convincing.

You can imagine something that is much faster and has a much longer battery life than the AMD Phoenix APUs used by all current handholds du jour, such as the Asus RoG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go. Adding DLSS upscaling, much better ray tracing, results will certainly be big, fat yes please.

For now, this is just a rumor from X users who call themselves "GPU veterans." But MediaTek and Nvidia have a form and are currently producing chips for cars with Arm cores and Nvidia graphics and AI blocks. 

Of course, the Nintendo Switch uses nvidia Tegra X1, which combines 4 Arm design cores with Nvidia Maxwell-era graphics. Also, Nvidia's own Shield handheld (above) and Shield TV devices combined off-the-shelf Arm cores with Nvidia graphics.

The next direct question is hard to see why Nvidia works with MediaTek on such a chip and what kind of Arm core it has.

MediaTek certainly has a strong track record of selling chips for mobile devices, so the relationship that Nvidia wants to rely on may have been established, and there may even be attempts to introduce GPU technology into mobile phones. Getting Mediatek to do the donkey's job of fitting the chip with a generic Arm core and selling it to a device manufacturer might simply be cheap and easy.

After all, Nvidia is pretty busy with its burgeoning AI business and is overflowing with cash. So you can understand why the company might prefer to pay MediaTek to cook a handheld gaming SoC with Nvidia IP, then all sa

on the other hand, nvidia graphics as well as the license of the general core design Arm itself rather than some fancy, custom-built Arm CPU cores. Han MediaTek, who did not have a track record of developing its own Arm core, does not have much experience. So that task will probably fall on Nvidia, at that point you are wondering why Nvidia needs MediaTek. Therefore, the simple fact of the MediaTek-Nvidia alliance means a ready-made Arm core. If that sounds disappointing, the rumors have that Arm's next-generation Cortex X5CPU core is a big step forward and what Intel and AMD can offer from the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite core

In addition, if MediaTek and Nvidia are working together on an AI PC chip for laptops with Arm X5 cores and Nvidia AI NPU and graphics, To tie this together, Nvidia and MediaTek have publicly announced a joint venture SoC with Arm cores and Nvidia GPUs and AI blocks.

Not a big jump from there to a similar chip optimized for laptops. And once you have that it's a relatively small beer to make something for the gaming handheld.

Of course, it all covers hardware. Making the software, especially the game, work well is a can of completely different worms. But if you have a company that has the resources, technical know-how and industry ties to make pc games work well on Arm chips, it should be Nvidia.