AMD acquires Nitero for their 60GHz Wi-FI for VR/AR tech

Nitero has been a company getting its name into headlines by teasing that it was working on phase-array beamforming millimeter wave 60GHz chip for VR headsets, with the fabless semiconductor company based in Austin, Texas - perfect for AMD with its base there.

AMD acquired Nitero without many details, but the deal includes Nitero's wireless virtual reality IP, and all of its employees, with Nitero co-founder and CEO, Pat Kelly, joining AMD as their new Corporate Vice President, Wireless IP. AMD's Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Mark Papermaster, said in a press release: "Unwieldly headset cables remain a significant barrier to drive widespread adoption of VR. Our newly acquired wireless VR technology is focused on solving this challenge, and is another example of AMD making long-term technology investments to develop high-performance computing and graphics technologies that can create more immersive computing experiences".

The future that AMD buys with the acquisition shows their commitment to the next generation of VR technology, as the high-end 60GHz wireless technology will allow massive amounts of bandwidth to be blasted between the base station and your next-gen wireless VR headset. It will allow high-quality VR at much higher resolutions than we have today, at much higher refresh rates than we have today, in room-scale VR environments without the base station needing to be in line of sight.

AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega graphics card is going to get a huge workout from a next-gen wireless VR headset, hopefully pushing 4K 120Hz per eye - which will really make the new High Bandwidth Cache (HBC) and HBM2 tech come into play. 2017 is the most exciting year on AMD's record with the launch of Ryzen, the upcoming launch of the Radeon RX 500 series and soon - the next-gen Radeon RX Vega graphics card family, and now the acquisition of Nitero.

AMD have their high-end/workstation HEDT competitor in Naples, with up to 64C/128T on multi-chip systems, and 12C/24T chips that might not be as expensive as you think.