Nvidia and Intel 'seismic' deal live updates: New 'x86 RTX' chips, $5 billion investment and more

Ming-Chi Kuo weighs in

You'll know that name as the analyst who is usually pretty bang-on with Apple rumors and leaks! But the attention has been turned to this Nvidia-Intel deal. Here's what we've learned from this analysis:

• Nvidia N1X is up in the air: Nvidia has been rumored to be working on its own ARM processor, but that now "carries high uncertainty." Intel was facing "rapidly enhancing competitiveness in the GPU sector," so to tie these two together makes the world of sense.
• High synergy for enterprise: Intel has the distribution channels for x86 servers, while Nvidia holds all the cards technologically (AI chips, NVLink and CUDA to name only 3), so to bring them together makes for a huge opportunity to "significantly benefit from substantial potential demand"
• TSMC remains unaffected for now: There is the question of using Intel's foundry for producing more chips in this partnership. But with the "advanced process advantage" of TSMC chip making expected to "persist at least until 2030," this agreement doesn't look set to rock the boat here. More importantly though, it could impact the market share of competitors like AMD and Broadcom.

What does this mean for Arc graphics?

It's a tough question. Intel moving into this partnership with Nvidia does bring the planet's biggest GPU-maker in, and that could be curtains for Arc GPU.

That's a shame — especially given the huge gains the company has made in this space (particularly with the Intel Arc B580), but given how far ahead Nvidia actually is, this wouldn't be a surprising conclusion.

Wait...this sounds familiar

As Paul highlights in his report for Tom's Hardware, this isn't the first time Intel has joined up with another company for its GPU tech. Back in 2017, there was a Kaby Lake-G chip that was fused with an AMD Radeon GPU chiplet.

This is sort of similar in concept to what you'll see between Intel and Nvidia, but there's some significant differences. On paper, it's the same principal — take Intel's CPU and put and AMD GPU on the same die.

But in this upcoming SoC, the RTX GPU will be connected by the vastly faster and more efficient NVLink interface, and there will be uniform memory access — meaning the CPU and GPU will be able to access the same stock of memory intelligently.

The $5 billion deal

At $23.28 per share, Nvidia is now one of the largest shareholders in Intel behind the U.S. Government. Part of me is a little curious about whether there is another intention to this deal — but that will be all dependent on whether Nvidia goes on a shopping spree and buys more. The agreement is clear in exactly how much right now.

AMD should be worried

As you know, I've been blown away by the AMD Ryzen AI Max 395+ chip found in the Asus ROG Flow Z13. It's integrated graphics performance is simply mindblowing and can rival a lot of dedicated GPU gaming laptops.

APUs like this have been Team Red's bread and butter, but to have Intel and Nvidia coming together — two titans in note CPUs and gaming GPUs — to build its own SoCs is going to bring a massively intense competition to AMD.

DLSS4 is already quite a ways ahead of any FSR capabilities, and the game support for Nvidia's neural rendering smarts is far larger too. This seems like a slam dunk.

"Seismic for Intel"

For more thoughts, I've reached out to Paul Alcorn, Editor-in-chief of Tom's Hardware who originally broke the story. This is a pivotal moment and a real lifeline for Intel, and Alcorn agrees.

"The announcement is nothing short of seismic for Intel, which already counts the United Sates of America as its largest shareholder, and now counts the world's largest company, Nvidia, as one of its other largest shareholders."

And in terms of their personal computing aspirations, AMD should be very worried by this announcement.

"Intel's new x86 RTX CPUs will compete directly with AMD's APUs by design. For AMD, that means it faces intensifying competition from a company with the leading market share in notebook CPUs (Intel ships ~79% of laptop chips worldwide) that's now armed with GPU tech from Nvidia, which ships 92% of the world's gaming GPUs."

"Innovating across our portfolio"

Heading over to Team Blue, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has also been sharing his excitement for this partnership with Intel (unsurprising given the stock price has shot up over 30% since the announcement)!

“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,” he commented.

“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.”

A "historic collaboration"

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang has been sharing his excitement over this new deal with Intel. “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,” he commented.

“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.”

Handheld gaming is about to change

And while I could sit here and talk about the Intel x86 RTX SoC itself (and I will when we get more detail), I want to talk about the doors a partnership like this opens.

Handheld gaming has been largely dominated by AMD's chips like the Ryzen Z2 Extreme in the ROG Xbox Ally X. But the MSI Claw 8 AI Plus has been the one to stick with Intel and see some solid framerates because of it.

Now, with Nvidia DNA, PC handheld gaming could be incredible. DLSS tech has been outstripping AMD's FSR equivalent for a while now, and I'd just love to see this come to handhelds.

Let's talk about that Intel x86 RTX SOC

This is the most intriguing bit to me, so let's go into what this could be. Intel's current CPUs pack both the compute power and the company's own Arc GPU tech, and they've been pretty good.

What this Nvidia partnership will do is essentially perform a GPU brain transplant — taking that Arc GPU out and replacing it with an RTX graphics chiplet. This super tight integration brings huge gaming performance into a package on one chip, which could be huge competition for AMD's all-in-one chipsets too.

For PC gaming, this could knock it out of the park with access to DLSS 4, neural rendering technologies and more.

What will Intel and Nvidia make together?

This partnership looks set to be far-reaching through both enterprise and consumer computing, so let's break down what products look set to be made.

First of all, this isn't just a "one and done" situation, the companies will collaborate to "jointly develop multiple generations of custom data center and PC products." That's a multi-year joint venture! In terms of the specifics.

• Data centers: Intel will build Nvidia-custom x86 CPUs to be integrated into its AI infrastructure for enterprise use.
• PC gaming: Most enticing to me is the Intel x86 RTX SOCs. Simply put, rather than Intel's own integrated graphics on its Core Ultra CPUs, these chips will get Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets instead. That could open the door to a huge performance boost!

Press conference at 1pm ET / 10am PT / 6pm BST

The CEOs of Nvidia and Intel will be conducting a webcast press conference later today at 1pm ET. We'll be listening in to what is discussed about this seismic deal and what this means for the future of PC CPUs!

Welcome to the live blog!

There are a lot of moving parts here, so let's go quickly into how this is big news for you. Besides the business talk and the many different machinations (which I will cover), the big thing here is the Intel x86 RTX SOCs for the PC gaming market.

Up until this point, the integrated graphics in Intel Core Ultra CPUs have been pretty impressive. But it's clear that Nvidia has led the way on GPU performance, so to see a tight integration like this — an Intel CPU with Nvidia RTX chiplet for gaming performance — is mightily exciting.

Merging these into one package could make this a huge rival to AMD's own APUs that sport both compute and graphics in one package.