In a surprise announcement that finds two long-time rivals working together, Nvidia and Intel announced today that the companies will jointly develop multiple new generations of x86 products together — a seismic shift with profound implications for the entire world of technology. Before the news broke, Tom's Hardware spoke with Nvidia representatives to learn more details about the company’s plans.
The products include x86 Intel CPUs tightly fused with an Nvidia RTX graphics chiplet for the consumer gaming PC market, named the ‘Intel x86 RTX SOCs.’ Nvidia will also have Intel build custom x86 data center CPUs for its AI products for hyperscale and enterprise customers. Additionally, Nvidia will buy $5 billion in Intel common stock at $23.28 per share, representing a roughly 5% ownership stake in Intel. (Intel stock is now up 33% in premarket trading.)
The partnership between the two companies is in the very early stages, Nvidia told us, so the timeline for product releases along with any product specifications will be disclosed at a later, unspecified date. (Given the traditionally long lead-times for new processors, it is rational to expect these products will take at least a year, and likely longer, to come to market.)
Nvidia emphasized that the companies are committed to multi-generation roadmaps for the co-developed products, which represents a strong investment in the x86 ecosystem. But representatives tells us it also remains fully committed to other announced product roadmaps and architectures, including the company's Arm-based GB10 Grace Blackwell processors for workstations and the Nvidia Grace CPUs for data centers, as well as the next-gen Vera CPUs. Nvidia says it also remains committed to products on its internal roadmaps that haven’t been publicly disclosed yet, indicating that the new roadmap with Intel will merely be additive to existing initiatives.
The chip giant hasn’t disclosed whether it will use Intel Foundry to produce any of these products yet. However, while Intel has used TSMC to manufacture some recent products, its goal is to bring production of most high-performance products back into its own foundries.
Some products never left. For instance, Intel’s existing Granite Rapids data center processors use the ‘Intel 3’ node, and the upcoming Clearwater Forest Xeons will use Intel’s own 18A process node for compute. This suggests that at least some of the Nvidia-custom x86 silicon, particularly for the data center, could be fabbed on Intel nodes. Intel also uses TSMC to fabricate many of its client x86 processors, however, so we won’t know for sure until official announcements are made — particularly for the RTX GPU chiplet.
In either case, Nvidia has been mulling using Intel Foundry since 2022, has fabbed test chips there, and participates in the U.S. Defense Dept.'s RAMP-C project with Intel. The DoD project involves Nvidia already making chips on Intel's 18A process node, so it wouldn't be a total surprise.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors
While the two companies have engaged in heated competition in some market segments, Intel and Nvidia have partnered for decades, ensuring interoperability between their hardware and software for products spanning both the client and data center markets. And the PCIe interface has long been used to connect Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. The new partnership will find tighter integration using the NVLink interface for CPU-to-GPU communication, which affords up to 14 times more bandwidth along with lower latency than PCIe, thus granting the new x86 products access to the highest performance possible when paired with GPUs. Let’s dive into the details we’ve learned so far.
Intel x86 RTX SOCs for the PC gaming market
... continue reading