Intel is in very dire straits, and as such, the company needs investments and partnerships more than anything. Today, NVIDIA and Intel announced just such a partnership, in which NVIDIA will invest $5 billion into the troubled chip giant, while the two companies will develop products that combine Intel’s x86 processors with NVIDIA’s GPUs.
For data centers, Intel will build NVIDIA-custom x86 CPUs that NVIDIA will integrate into its AI infrastructure platforms and offer to the market.
For personal computing, Intel will build and offer to the market x86 system-on-chips (SOCs) that integrate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets. These new x86 RTX SOCs will power a wide range of PCs that demand integration of world-class CPUs and GPUs.
↫ NVIDIA press release
My immediate reaction to this news was to worry about the future of Intel’s ARC graphics efforts. Just as the latest crop of their ARC GPUs have received a ton of good press and positive feedback, with some of their cards becoming the go-to suggestion for a budget-friendly but almost on-par alternative to offerings from NVIDIA and AMD, it would be a huge blow to user choice and competition if Intel were to abandon the effort.
I think this news pretty much spells the end for the ARC graphics effort. Making dedicated GPUs able to compete with AMD and NVIDIA must come at a pretty big financial cost for Intel, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve been itching to find an excuse to can the whole project. With NVIDIA GPUs fulfilling the role of more powerful integrated GPUs, all Intel really needs is a skeleton crew developing the basic integrated GPUs for cheaper and non-gaming oriented devices, which would be a lot cheaper to maintain.
For just $5 billion dollars, NVIDIA most likely just eliminated a budding competitor in the GPU space. That’s cheap.
I think your looking at this backwards Thom.
This isnt about adding Nvidia to intel chips its about adding intel (x86) to Nvidia chips.
This allows Nvidia to take advantage of Linux and other solutions already optimised for x86.
Think the Jetson Orin Nano Super but compatible with everything and scalable into enterprise solutions.
Add a power supply and you have a fully functional AI system. Or a games console. Or Or Or that runs on Linux and is fully compatible with existing software.
Exactly. When you look at this carefully, this is a desperate move by NVidia. Given recent events with China and the fact that Arc is pretty much destroying NVidia’s in price/performance.
NVidia wants to ensure their proprietary platform still has a market share. What better way than to have it already available on the CPU’s everyone uses?
We are of course unaware of the details, but I doubt Intel’s going to drop Arc. I see this as a move that ultimately benefits Intel more.
This of course spells the end of AMD. Good riddance.
AMD’s APU are quite good and well integrated. No so with Nvidia’s Optimus.
The return of Ion ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Ion