It's not too often that I get a complete 'out of the blue' surprise in PC hardware land, but the recent announcement of an Intel-Nvidia partnership certainly fits that bill. And it's even more surprising to discover the two companies, which will now be working together on both datacentre and consumer systems, have been working towards this for a while, keeping it quiet.
During a press conference yesterday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang explained: "The two technology teams have been discussing and architecting solutions now for probably coming up to a year, and the two architecture teams—well, it's three architecture teams—are working across, of course, the CPU architecture, as well as product lines for server and PCs."
Why did we not know about these teams working together for the past few months? Simple, they kept schtum:
"There were no communications with anybody else, except between [Intel CEO] Lip-Bu, myself, and the technical teams that were working on this partnership, and we kept it really quiet."
The partnership involves a $5 billion buy-in from Nvidia, and is expected to centre mostly around AI but we're hoping there's at least a smidge of gaming goodness to come from it. Intel processors are going to be NVLink'd upto Nvidia GPUs in datacentres, and in the consumer market we can expect what is sure to initially seem like Frankenstein's monster chips melding Intel and Nvidia chips into single system-on-chips (SoCs). I'm sure we'll get used to that, though.
While Nvidia is sure to get something out of all this—namely, even more foothold in the datacentre market, more pressure on AMD, and more presence in the laptop market—Intel arguably has a lot more to gain. Huang certainly sees much in it for Chipzilla (can we call Intel that, anymore?):
"You know, obviously, it's a very substantial partnership. This is going to expand the market opportunity for Intel in AI infrastructure that is largely unexposed to them today, and it's going to expose to Intel in the consumer notebook market, where really exquisite GPUs are necessary. And so these two markets are unexposed to Intel today, and it's going to be brand new growth markets for Intel."
That is of course not to mention all the Intel shares Nvidia has just bought up.
We're not expecting to see any Intel-Nvidia SoCs in the near future, but in three or four years, the chip landscape might start to seem very different. It could certainly open the door to a big enough change that I can appreciate the left-field announcement after months of secrecy.
