Did you feel that? There was a tectonic shift in the PC market just now – Nvidia announced that it is buying $5 billion worth of Intel’s common stock and, more importantly, the two companies will jointly build products for PC and servers.
Here’s the most exciting bit for home users – Intel will be building x86 systems on a chip that integrate Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets. Intel+Nvidia is a common enough combo these days in laptops, but having the silicon in one package might have big implications for performance and efficiency.
Investors will be happy to learn that Intel will also build custom x86 CPUs for Nvidia, which will be integrated into Nvidia’s AI infrastructure offerings. Nvidia and Intel parts will talk to each other over NVLink.
As you may remember, Nvidia tried to acquire ARM in a deal that ultimately fell through. Nvidia uses ARM cores in some of its products, e.g. the Jetson AGX Orin features Cortex-A78AE cores. In the past, Nvidia had custom ARM cores too like the Vera and Denver – now it’s getting custom x86 cores, which will give customers more options.
Anyway, Nvidia will invest $5 billion in Intel’s common stock at $23.28 per share. Intel’s stock surged up at the news. This is subject to regulatory approval, of course.
“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,” wrote Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia.
