NVIDIA and Intel have announced a historic collaboration that will see them jointly develop a new generation of custom processors for both data centers and personal computers. NVIDIA is also investing $5 billion in Intel’s common stock.
This is a bit strange, especially when you consider the fierce competition between the two companies over the years. This collaboration is set to integrate NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing with Intel’s CPU technologies, creating what the companies are calling “a fusion of two world-class platforms.”
Even still, this feels like the start of something amazing if the two can remain partners long enough to release hardware. For years, we’ve had the AMD versus Intel rivalry on the CPU front and the AMD versus NVIDIA battle in the GPU space. Now, with this new agreement, Intel will be building x86 system-on-chips (SoCs) that will have NVIDIA’s RTX GPU chiplets integrated directly into them.
This is a huge shift in the industry and could mean a whole new breed of powerful laptops and PCs that have the best of both worlds. I’m looking forward to seeing a laptop with an Intel CPU and a powerful NVIDIA RTX GPU on the same chip, working together seamlessly. I have no doubt that I would not be able to afford it, but just seeing it in action would be enough.
The two companies will focus on seamlessly connecting their architectures using something called NVIDIA NVLink. For those of you who don’t know, NVLink is a high-speed communication link that lets GPUs, and now apparently CPUs and GPUs, talk to each other with a ton of bandwidth and very little latency.
NVIDIA NVLink is a technology that has been a cornerstone of NVIDIA’s high-performance computing and AI platforms for years, and now it will be a key part of these new Intel products. It should translate to some serious performance gains, especially for things like gaming and content creation, where the CPU and GPU need to work together without a hitch.
This collaboration is just as important on the data center side. Intel will be designing and manufacturing custom x86 CPUs that NVIDIA will use in its AI infrastructure platforms. This is a big win for Intel’s manufacturing business and a sign of trust from NVIDIA, a company that has been a huge force in the AI revolution. NVIDIA’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, said that this collaboration will “tightly couple” NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing stack, which is built on its CUDA architecture, with Intel’s CPUs and the vast x86 ecosystem.
With NVIDIA’s $5 billion investment in Intel’s common stock, it’s clear that this is more than just a simple product deal. It is likely a long-term commitment from NVIDIA, and a huge lifeline for Intel, which has been struggling lately. However, Intel is no stranger to these deals. Just a year ago, Intel and AMD were teaming up to create a group to make sure the x86 platform would continue to evolve and compete with the growing threat of ARM-based chips.
Intel’s new partnership with NVIDIA, one of the biggest players in the ARM ecosystem, will likely prove even more beneficial for the company.
Source: Intel
