NVIDIA Announces A New $5 Billion USD Partnership With Intel

Today In Things You Never Expected To Hear …

NVIDIA, barring regulatory interference, will be purchasing $5 billion USD worth of Intel stock and in return will work with Intel to incorporate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets into upcoming Intel processors.  These two companies were considered rivals in the AI market, but Intel never had anywhere near the market share NVIDIA has in that market.  As far as AI design goes, NVIDIA is the preferred choice and it seems Intel has realized the wisdom of joining forces with something that they can’t compete with.

This is not great news for those designing the Arc architecture at Intel, but could mean Arc GPUs undergo a complete change.  If Intel starts incorporating RTX chiplets in a new generation of Arc cards it could make the market much more interesting.  

That won’t be the biggest impact of this partnership, that will happen in the server room and is going to be bad news for ARM.  Jensen said that the goal is NVLink integration in the data centre, and this means Intel will be able to provide an attractive product to NVIDIA’s customers.  In the old days, one would expect NVIDIA to benefit from Intel including their designs in Intel’s products.  Instead we are in a reality where Intel is being supported by NVIDIA, something which would be inconceivable 10 years ago. 

The ability for NVIDIA to sell Intel designs to their customers spells very bad news for AMD and ARM.  AMD has been working on ROCm 7 but it’s not likely to compete against NVIDIA’s designs, partnered with Intel’s chips.