Nvidia is missing a golden opportunity in PC gaming

There’s a rising tide of handheld gaming PCs, and Nvidia is missing out on the action. The push of handhelds into the mainstream started with some purpose-built AMD systems on a chip (SoCs), but now Intel is joining the fray with its Meteor Lake platform. Out of the big three, only one company is missing: Nvidia.

Nvidia probably isn’t too concerned with making an SoC for handhelds — after all, it was AI that pushed it to become a trillion-dollar company — and it’s a long shot that the company would ever make one. With that in mind, consider what follows to be wishful thinking because Nvidia could make one insane SoC for handheld gaming PCs.

Charted territory

This isn’t totally uncharted territory for Nvidia. You probably know about the Tegra series of SoCs from Nvidia, which have been used in gaming devices in the past. The Tegra 3 was at the heart of the ill-fated Ouya game console, and most famously, the Tegra X1 powers the Nintendo Switch. Nvidia has since moved on with its SoC efforts, focusing on applications in autonomous vehicles and AI.

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It’s not quite a one-to-one transition. You can’t just slap one of Nvidia’s SoCs inside a Windows handheld and expect things to work. They use ARM designs for the CPU cores, and they’re developed with other platforms in mind, so the software support isn’t there for a gaming device running SteamOS or Windows. At the very least, though, Nvidia can design the hardware.

There may not be a reason to design that hardware, given Nvidia’s massive strides in the data center, but it has the capacity to make it happen. Last year, Nvidia reported having over 26,000 employees, and according to a report from last year, Nvidia is already working on developing ARM-based PC chips for Windows PCs.

Just because Nvidia can do it, and Intel and AMD are already doing it, doesn’t mean that