In a surprise move, long-time rivals Intel and NVIDIA have announced a joint partnership that will see both companies build new x86 products that fuse Intel CPUs with NVIDIA GPUs dubbed "Intel x86 RTX SOCs."
NVIDIA says the partnership is still in early stages, but that it includes a roadmap with multiple new generations of chips in the works. The partnership will also see NVIDIA buy $5 billion in Intel stock at $23.28 per share, which should help the company in its foundry ambitions against TSMC.
The new Intel x86 RTX SoCs will come with an x86 CPU that is tightly integrated with NVIDIA's RTX GPUs via NVLink. This means the processor will have both CPU and GPU units merged into one compact chip package, similar to AMD's APUs.
In fact, this isn't the first time Intel has partnered up to make CPUs fused with GPUs. In 2017, Intel partnered with AMD to create something similar with its Kaby Lake-G chips, which were fused with an AMD Radeon GPU. The difference is that this time, the chips will share the same memory pool for increased performance.
These chips will benefit power users and gamers who are looking for smaller PCs or laptops for creative or gaming tasks. AMD has taken the handheld and laptop gaming market by storm in recent years, and today's partnership announcement between Intel and NVIDIA seems like an attempt to fight back against AMD's popular and powerful APUs that have made gaming on the go viable.
In addition to the consumer chips, NVIDIA also says that the partnership will also see Intel fabricate custom x86 data center CPUs for NVIDIA, which will aid them in their AI and enterprise efforts. NVIDIA also says this partnership does not impact its work on Arm-based chips.
Intel is yet to comment on the partnership, but NVIDIA says that there's no timeline for when the first Intel x86 RTX SoCs will be on the market. Given the usual long lead times for CPU and GPU development, it will likely be at least a year before we hear anything more about a real-life product that consumers can buy.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan are expected to hold a press conference later today, where they will discuss the partnership in more detail.
via Tom's Hardware
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