Intel and Nvidia reveal more details on new partnership

Last night, following the announcement of Nvidia's $5 billion investment in Intel, the CEOs of both companies sat down for a press conference. Here, we got answers to a few lingering questions about the deal, and a more detailed picture on what impact this will have on both Nvidia and Intel product offerings. 

For those who missed the news yesterday, Nvidia has acquired $5 billion worth of Intel stock. On top of the investment, Intel and Nvidia will now proceed with joint-development projects, with the goal of bringing new PC and datacentre products to market. On the PC side, Nvidia will finally break into the ‘integrated graphics' market for laptops, with RTX cores being combined with Intel CPUs for a new generation of powerful, thin and light gaming laptops. On the Datacentre side, Nvidia will combine its GPUs with Intel CPUs to introduce rack-scale x86 AI super computers to the market. Currently, Nvidia only offers NVLink rack-scale systems using Arm CPUs.

During the press conference last night, Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, described this new partnership as “an incredible investment”. However, Nvidia will not be moving its GPU production to Intel Foundry Services at this time. Nvidia will remain with TSMC for now. However, the company will also be buying a lot of Intel CPUs for its new rack-scale x86 AI systems. This does not mean that Nvidia will drop its work on Arm products, so products like the Grace superchip will continue to see future generations.

As Huang puts it, the biggest benefit for Intel is the ability to “expand the market opportunity in AI infrastructure”, a market that Nvidia is currently the largest supplier for. As for how Intel sees this new partnership impacting them, CEO, Lip Bu Tan, said that it will open up “a new era of x86 innovation” and in order to reach those innovation goals, Intel wants to shift towards a “lean, fast moving” culture.

While Intel would not comment on roadmaps publicly, a spokesperson did tell PCWorld that Intel will “continue to have GPU offerings”, so development on Arc graphics should keep going.

No official Intel + Nvidia products have been announced yet but next year is going to be very interesting.

KitGuru Says: Do you think Intel + Nvidia APUs will take over the laptop market? 

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