I do so love a bit of healthy competition. Nvidia announced today it will purchase chip-maker PortalPlayer for $357 million. PortalPlayer, which supplied Apple chips for its iPods up until this April when Apple switched suppliers, specializes in high-performance system-on-chip (SoC) technology designed for use in mobile media players. With Nvidia’s graphics know-how and PortalPlayer’s mobile-chip expertise, the combination stands to make a serious dent in ATI’s mobile-GPU business.
Currently, Nvidia technology shows up in a few handhelds and mobile phones, but ATI (now AMD) controls the lion’s share of the mobile graphics’ market with its Imageon chips.
NVIDIA snaps up PortalPlayer [ars technica]