NVIDIA may have just thrown Intel a lifeline. In a surprise announcement, the green GPU brand announced to the world that it is has partnered up with the blue chipmaker and together, they will be jointly developing “multiple new generations x86 products”.
To seal the deal, NVIDIA has also purchased US$5 billion (~RM21 billion) worth of Intel common stock, at US$23.28 (~RM98) a share. That’s roughly 6% below the blue chipmaker’s current market value, but more importantly, it also comes just after the US government took a 10% equity stake in it.
The alleged chipsets both NVIDIA and Intel are developing will, according Tom’s Hardware, be designed for the PC gaming market. Specifically, the x86 RTX SoC will come with an x86 CPU chiplet that’s tightly connected with an NVIDA RTX GPU chiplet via the latter’s NVLink interface. Basically, a direct competitor to AMD’s APU products.
Again, the announcement of the partnership pretty much caught alot of us off-guard, this writer included. To be clear, though, this isn’t the first time Intel has struck up a deal to make chips with other titans of the chipmaking industry.
Back in 2017, Intel partnered up with AMD to produce Kaby Lake-G, a processor that combined the blue chipmaker’s CPU cores with AMD’s Radeon RX Vega GPU cores. This was long before it ventured out into the world of dedicated GPUs and created its own Xe core technology, along with the ARC branding. In 2019, it discontinued the series.
In addition to making new APU-like chips, Intel will also build x86 datacentres CPUs for NVIDIA, which the green GPU brand will then sell as its own products to enterprise and datacentre customers. It’s clear that both companies have something to give each other in that sense – Intel has long offered its customer base its Xeon workstation CPUs, and with NVIDIA’s NVLink Fusion technology, this could become something of a potent combo.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware)
