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.
AMD has consistently been the best price/performance in CPUs and compatibility in GPUs when running Linux for a very long time now. The Steam Deck is probably the most efficient consumer PC on the market that isn’t an Apple Silicon device. I don’t think AMD is going anywhere, anytime soon.
Of the three big players, AMD is the most open source friendly these days what with Intel firing all of its open source devs and turning its back on the community. And everyone knows NVIDIA is vehemently hostile towards open source.
That word “desperate” doesn’t mean what you want it to mean when applied to NVDA. LOL.
Desperate move for Nvidia? The desperate one is Intel… I bet Nvidia will buy Intel in next five years.
They probably can’t without losing access to the x86 license.
I’m pretty sure AMD would nix NVIDIA acquiring Intel.
They have been working on this for over a year and has nothing to do with China. And nothing to do with Intel GPUs as this is for servers not low end.
People were speculating this was because AMD CPU+NVIDIA GPU has been a popular combination lately, and this is a way to get NVIDIA to push Intel procs.
Indeed. This looks more like a sales pipeline for Intel, the way the game console chips are a sales pipeline for AMD. The hybrid chips are probably going to be NVIDIA branded CPUs.
Of course, Intel is probably going to be a shell of a company shortly, and the chip side is ultimately going to end up being a NVIDIA sock puppet.
The return of Ion ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia_Ion
I agree with others takes here, not too worried for ARC in the immediate future.
That said, it did remind me of the Kaby Lake+Radeon/Vega hybrid CPUs they made not to long ago (and not very long) (I’m getting old, that was ~2018, might sound like ancient times for some) … which from an OSS advocate and occasional CS player PoV was heaven (Nvidia has _always_ deserved the middle finger)
But ATI is no more, and the “smaller” AMD at the time was no threat, It’s unlikely Intel would have teamed up with AMD now 🙂
How does this affect Intel CPUs for laptops and desktops? Will they have an Nvidia iGPU? If so, does it mean that Intel laptops will require proprietary Nvidia drivers?
I don’t think it’s about cost – maybe other than finding a market to sell to (though that’s solvable, leading to the next point.) The problem here, is that the “talent pool” if you can call it that, that boards of directors of American companies draw from, is exceedingly small, and they aren’t the best nor the brightest – they are just the children of wealthy people. These fools can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. They have moderate money management skills, but that’s about it. It’s just too damn hard for them to make CPUs AND make GPUs, at the same time. Ever notice how most start=ups these days make only one product? It’s not just them – it’s all American companies. They are run by small minded nimrods.
So…. they will shoot down their only interesting and promissing product in these past few years? Great.
Intel have categorically started that ARC is NOT dead and development will continue!…
https://www.theverge.com/news/781635/intel-says-arc-gpus-will-live-on-after-nvidia-deal
https://wccftech.com/intel-assures-will-continue-to-have-gpu-product-offerings-in-future-nvidia-deal-complimentary/
PR stance, hence ARC is dead.
“Anyone who says he isn’t going to resign, four times, definitely will.” — John Kenneth Galbraith
ARC is dead. LOL This is the first step in cutting those heads.
Not because of this, but because of where Intel is as a company. It’s too bad. AMD and NVIDIA don’t really play on the low end (< 75W) and would rather sell to datacenters.
This is terrible.
Why? I have already seen this “deja vu”
I have (had) a Intel NUC 8 Enthusiast (NUC8i7HVK) with what is called RX Vega graphics. Basically an Intel CPU and AMD GPU on the same package.
End result? Both companies pushing driver responsibility to each other, and users having to hack drivers to be able to run on their system. (And today there is no Windows 11 official support, but fortunately Windows 10 driver runs).
The otherwise perfect machine is plagued with driver issues. (I believe this was also why Apple + nvidia partnership soured in the past, but I don’t have much insight on that).
And worse?
Intel is acting like a headless chicken. They really had one short period when a competent CEO came in, built the groundwork for the now great chips, and they kicked him out since the quarterly results meant impatience for long term vision.
I am glad I sold off all my Intel stock. I hope nvidia does not go down with them.
(Sorry for the tone of the rant. The Arc was a good thing that they did, and is now practically dead)
I’m just going to leave this here:
https://youtu.be/h9BdITGw9pY
As someone that has been observing Intel over the years, this is not surprising. They’ve hemorrhaged a majority of the talent that they once had and have been happy with their dominance in an industry with a high barrier of entry. They’re down a slippery slope with no point of return. I’ve lost all hope for them after Jim Keller’s Royal Core project was given the boot. I expect nVidia to do a McDonnell Douglas like take over of Intel in the not too distant future. With the current administration, monopolies merging into a larger giant is a very real possibility.
It will be interesting to see where the Intel graphics IP ends up.
Anyone want to speculate about where that ends up? ARM? SiFive? LOL