NVIDIA are investing $5 billion in Intel to develop new chips together

A huge announcement for the entire computing industry came today, with NVIDIA and Intel teaming up to make new chips for data centre and consumers too. This is of course, largely about AI, and they want to ensure they stay ahead of AMD and Arm chip makers.

NVIDIA have been wanting to do some proper CPUs for a while, so it's no surprise that with this deal Intel will then be building custom CPUs for NVIDIA to use in data centres. But for personal computing, us normies, Intel plan to build " x86 system-on-chips (SOCs) that integrate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets".

That will be very interesting to see on the desktop, laptop and handheld gaming side. Can you imagine a future Steam Deck 3 that has an Intel CPU with NVIDIA RTX? Sure would be an interesting way for both Intel and NVIDIA to suck up some more of the market from AMD.

Their statements from the press releases:

“AI is powering a new industrial revolution and reinventing every layer of the computing stack — from silicon to systems to software. At the heart of this reinvention is NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture,” said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. “This historic collaboration tightly couples NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing stack with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem — a fusion of two world-class platforms. Together, we will expand our ecosystems and lay the foundation for the next era of computing.”

“Intel’s x86 architecture has been foundational to modern computing for decades — and we are innovating across our portfolio to enable the workloads of the future,” said Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel. “Intel’s leading data center and client computing platforms, combined with our process technology, manufacturing and advanced packaging capabilities, will complement NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing leadership to enable new breakthroughs for the industry. We appreciate the confidence Jensen and the NVIDIA team have placed in us with their investment and look forward to the work ahead as we innovate for customers and grow our business.”

See more in the Intel and NVIDIA press releases.

I should note, the deal is not complete yet. They need to go through regulator approval first as usual for such a big deal.

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