is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Today, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan held a joint webcast to explain just why the world’s most valuable company (Nvidia’s at $4.28 trillion) is throwing a $5 billion lifeline to a struggling competitor.
And, Huang insisted, it’s not a strategic shift away from the newer Arm architecture towards the venerable x86, which has driven PCs and servers for decades. “We’re fully committed to the Arm roadmap, we have lots and lots of customers for Arm,” he said, adding later that “this doesn’t affect any of that.” Nor is it a shift from TSMC to Intel as manufacturing partner for Nvidia’s chips — Huang quickly turned to effuse praise for TSMC as soon as a reporter asked — or about manufacturing in the US.
Instead, over the course of the 40-minute call, Nvidia and Intel basically said they were going to eat AMD’s lunch.
CEOs of both companies on the webcast. Image: Nvidia and Intel
AMD is the one chipmaker that competes with both Intel and Nvidia, and it’s long been competitive in one hugely important way: while Intel has always specialized in CPUs, and Nvidia has always specialized in GPUs, AMD does both, and it’s become very good at putting both into the same chip.
That’s why Sony put AMD into the PS4, PS5 and reportedly the PS6; why Microsoft put them in the Xbox One, Xbox Series and the next Xbox, and why almost every handheld gaming PC since the Steam Deck uses an AMD chip. It’s why AMD is finally a reason to buy a laptop, instead of consigning it to budget status like it used to.
“There’s an entire segment of the market where the CPU and GPU are integrated, and it’s for form-factor reasons, or cost reasons, or battery life reasons, all kinds of reasons, and that segment has been largely unaddressed by Nvidia today,” Nvidia’s CEO just admitted on the call.
He continued:
... continue reading