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This really wasn't a surprise, nVidia has seemed to be itching for a meaningful entry to the CPU market and when intel's CEO started undoing all and any future investment in the company it was clear everything was being setup for a sell off.

5 Billion is just a start but this is a gift for nVidia to eventually squire intel.

> For personal computing, Intel will build and offer to the market x86 system-on-chips (SOCs) that integrate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets. These new x86 RTX SOCs will power a wide range of PCs that demand integration of world-class CPUs and GPUs.

https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1750/...

What’s old is new again: back in 2017, Intel tried something similar with AMD (Kaby Lake-G). They paired a Kaby Lake CPU with a Vega GPU and HBM, but the product flopped: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-discontinue-kaby-lak...

That was targeted at supporting more tightly integrated and performant Macbooks .... it flopped because Apple came up with M1, not because it was bad per se.

The ryzen APUs had a rocky start but are properly good now, the concept is sound

apple never shipped a product with that, but it made for an excellent hackintosh

To me, this just validates what AMD has been doing for over a decade. Integrated GPUs for personal computing are the way forward.

Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps? This is giving similar vibes. That deal was arguably what saved Apple near its nadir. I’m not a fan of Intel’s past monopolistic practices, but for the sake of sustaining competition in the CPU/GPU market, I hope this deal works out for them even half as well as the MS deal did for Apple.

>Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps? This is giving similar vibes.

Doesn't feel the same because the 1997 investment was arranged by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. He had a long personal relationship with Bill Gates so could just call him to drop the outstanding lawsuits and get a commitment for future Office versions on the Mac. Basically, Steve Jobs at relatively young age of 42 was back at Apple in "founder mode" and made bold moves that the prior CEO Gil Amelio couldn't do.

Intel doesn't have the same type of leadership. Their new CEO is a career finance/investor instead of a "new products new innovation" type of leader. This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they "politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less restrictions selling chips to China.

I don't think that's an apt comparison, given that Microsoft and Apple were more direct competitors than Intel and Nvidia; the latter have a more symbiotic relationship. I think the rationale is closer to the competitor of my competitor is my friend -- they face two threats by AMD growing larger in the CPU market:

- a bigger R&D budget for their main competitor in the GPU market

- since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.

> since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.

This is why they built the Grace CPU - noting that they're using Arm's Neoverse V2 cores rather than their own design.

Here's Nvidia's CPUs, which are increasingly a required part of their data center offerings:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/

All they need now is a CEO like Steve Jobs…

Possibly more curious than the investment:

> Nvidia will also have Intel build custom x86 data center CPUs for its AI products for hyperscale and enterprise customers.

Hell has frozen over at Intel. Actually listening to people that want to buy your stuff, whatever next? Presumably someone over there doesn't want the AI wave to turn into a repeat of their famous success with mobile.

In the event Intel ever do get US based fabrication semi competitive again (and the national security motivation for doing so is intense) nVidia will likely have to be a major customer, so this does make sense. I remain doubtful that Intel can pull it off, and it will have to come from someone else.

If you were a big enough customer you could get a SKU for you, too. E.g. hyperscalers have Xeons which are not available for any other customers for any price.

But what they've completely resisted so far is any non trivial modification.

They turned down Acorn about the 286, which led to them creating the Arm, they have turned down various console makers, they turned down Apple on the iPhone, and so on. In all cases they thought the opportunities were beneath them.

Intel has always been too much about what they want to sell you, not what you need. That worked for them when the two aligned over backwards compat.

Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to a GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at last.

> Actually listening to people that want to buy your stuff, whatever next?

This is very likely the new culture that LBT is bringing in. This can only be good.

I can think of _nothing_ with a better shot at unseating nvidia than a merger with intel. Fingers crossed for ever closer union between the two.

They aren’t merging - this is Nvidia ensuring their tech is in Intel chips.

Yes indeed. It's still a step in that direction that opens up a bunch of communication channels between the execs of the two companies. Things move slowly.

You can't be serious.

Intel was well on its way to be a considerable threat to NVIDIA with their Arc line of GPUs, which are getting better and cheaper with each generation. Perhaps not in the enterprise and AI markets yet, but certainly on the consumer side.

This news muddies this approach, and I see it as a misstep for both Intel and for consumers. Intel is only helping NVIDIA, which puts them further away from unseating them than they were before.

Competition is always a net positive for consumers, while mergers are always a net negative. This news will only benefit shareholders of both companies, and Intel shareholders only in the short-term. In the long-term, it's making NVIDIA more powerful.

I'm not convinced. The latest Battlemage benchmarks I've seen put the B580 at the same performance as the RTX 4060 (which is a two years old entry-level card) but with 50% more power consumption (80W vs 125W average). It's good to have more than one open source supporting graphics vendor, but I don't think Nvidia is losing any sleep over Intel's GPU offerings.

Mergers where one company is on the verge of failing can be a net positive for consumers. Most obviously this happens when banks fail and people’s bank cards still work etc and at least initially the branches stay open.

Intel isn’t at that point, but the companies trajectory isn’t looking good. I’d happily sacrifice ARC to keep a duopoly in CPU’s.

I'm sure Larrabee will be superb any year now. The Xeon phi will rise again. For supporting evidence, the success of Aurora. Weren't the loss-leading arc GPUs cancelled as well? Maybe that only one generation of them, it does look like some are on the market now.

I think this partnership will damage nvidia. It might damage intel, but given they're circling the drain already, it's hard to make matters worse.

It's probably bad for consumers in every dimension.

Or to take the opposite, if nvidia rolled over intel and fired essentially everyone in the management chain and started trying to run the fabs themselves, good chance they'd turn the ship around and become even more powerful than they already are.

> It might damage intel, but given they're circling the drain already, it's hard to make matters worse.

How was Intel "circling the drain"?

They have a very competitive offering of CPUs, APUs, and GPUs, and the upcoming Panther Lake and Nova Lake architectures are very promising. Their products compete with AMD, NVIDIA, and ARM SoCs from the likes of Apple.

Intel may have been in a rut years ago, but they've recovered incredibly well.

This is why I'm puzzled by this decision, and as a consumer, I would rather use a fully Intel system than some bastardized version that also involves NVIDIA. We've seen how well that works with Optimus.

I wonder what this means for Intel's Arc lineup. Would be a bit crazy to have privileged access to a competitor's roadmap through just owning a chunk of them. I also have to admit I really hope they dont cancel them. A triopoly is at least better than a duopoly (or realistically, a monopoly as AMD's competitiveness in gpus is pretty questionable)

I hope this isn't "Shut-up" money to end ARC gpu development. i have an A770, i am very happy with it.

It feels like the end is in sight for dedicated graphics chips in consumer devices. Phones, consoles, and now Apple silicon are proving that SoC designs with unified memory and focused thermals are a winning strategy for efficiency and speed. Nvidia may be happy enough to move the graphics strategy onto an SoC and keep discrete boards just for AI.

Also, the US Govt bought $8.9B in stock last month I guess

https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/...

About 16 years ago, Intel was considered an ugly monopoly that Nvidia didn't like [0]. It seems as if they have switched sides now.

[0]: <https://www.fudzilla.com/6882-nvidia-continues-comic-campaig...>

they need domestic chip capabilities

SemiAccruate reported that NVidia had been dipping its toes into manufacturing its products using Intel's fabs several months ago, I'd assume that that's related.

best news i've heard in days

nVidia has also been licensing their GPU IP to MediaTek recently, who are working on a 2nd generation of a SoC that combines their ARM cores with nVidia GPUs now, catering to e.g. the automotive market.

Looks like using GPU IP to take over other brands' product lines is now officially an nVidia strategy.

I guess the obvious worry here is whether Intel will continue development of their own dGPUs, which have a lovely open driver stack.

Unless Nvidia outright absorbs intel I think Intel would have to be kind of crazy to stop developing GPUs.

So long as the AI craze is hanging in there it feels like having that expertise and IP is going to have high potential upside.

I'd agree, but Intel has also halted dGPU development efforts before, cf. the canned Larrabee project. Which was more troubled on the technology side however.

Yeah, Larrabee was nowhere near what they have now with Intel Arc.

Would be foolish to throw that away now that they're finally getting closer to "a product someone may want to buy" with things like B50 and B60.

Intel is a strategically important company for the United States. This smells like a token investment to appease the US government. Not saying it’s bad, but very much looks like that.

Only the fab part is. Intel needs to separate the two. Maybe Nvidia, AMD, or Qualcomm can buy the the fab part.

After the arm buyout fell through, I guess this is the next best thing. Plus a good deal for nvidia since Intel is pretty desperate at this point.

> It is unclear if Intel will issue new stock for Nvidia to purchase

Erm, a rather important point to bury down the story. The fiest question on anyone’s lips will be is this $5bn to build new chip technology, or $5bn for employees to spend on yachts?

It’s the most important part of the story. It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this. Why hold stock in Intel if the only people that ever buy the real stock and create buy pressure are the plebs? Here is the previous time…

> Intel stock experienced dilution because the U.S. government converted CHIPS Act grants into an equity stake, acquiring a significant ownership percentage at a discounted price, which increased the total number of outstanding shares and reduced existing shareholders' ownership percentage, according to The Motley Fool and Investing.com. This led to roughly 11% dilution for existing shareholders

> It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this.

To get money from the outside, you either have to take on debt or you have to give someone a share in the business. In this case, the board of directors concluded the latter is better. I don't understand why you think it is gross.

> It’s so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this.

Intel is up 30% pre market on this news so I think the existing shareholders will be fine.

Great news for all involved. It also would seem to validate Apple’s unified architecture for inference, and imply AMD is getting close…

You mean AMD's unified architecture. They were a founder of the HSA Foundation that drove innovation in this space complete with Linux kernel investments and unified compute SDKs, and they had the first shipping hardware support.

So AMD got ATI, and now NVidia gets Intel.

Difference is, AMD wasn't a competitor for ATi. One mostly built CPU's, while another- GPUs. These two, on the other hand, are competing in several major product categories. Overall, not a good look

I doubt we would be seeing Dell selling NVidia ARM CPUs anytime soon.

However I do imagine Intel GPUs, that were never great to start with, might be doomed, long term.

Also another possibility would be, there goes One API, which I doubt many people would care about, given how many rebrands SYSCL already went through.

What's the significance of $5B of stock? Does that mean controlling share in Intel?

It’s a corporate engagement ring.

Article mentions it amounts to ~5% ownership

It's written in the article that the $5B represents about 5% of Intel stock outstanding.

I would assume not given their market cap.

No, but it's still a big stake from the largest player in semis. You wouldn't expect a move like that if they didn't see an opportunity there.

Seems like when Microsoft invested in Apple to keep Apple from going out of business and turning Microsoft into a potential Monopoly.

This has been an interesting 1.5 months for Intel on all fronts. I wonder how long this deal was in the making, since the timing is impeccable, looking at the current administration's involvement with Intel.

Nowadays I always wonder to what extent such deals are actually driven by market considerations and to what extent it's catering to the Trump administration. Token investments into this state enterprise named Intel seems to be a practical way to cater goodwill with the autocrats.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

I know AMD used to be lacking but these days I guess they're probably the go-to on Linux because they share changes with the community

I don't like the idea of using Intel given their lack of disclosure for Spectre/Meltdown and some of their practices (towards AMD)

Give up 0.1% of shares to get 5% of Intel.

Seems to be an easy bet, if for no other reason than to make the US Government (Trump) happy. Trump gets to tout his +30% return on investment.

This is the first step that Nvidia takes to devour Intel.

5B is a fairly tiny stake (Intel's market cap is around 120B), other than the "we're now working together" signal, why is this news?

In terms of voting stock, they become the biggest owner after US Commerce Department.

As customer they get better access to Intel Foundry and can offload some capacity from TSMC.

> In terms of voting stock, they become the biggest owner after US Commerce Department.

As I understand it the government's shares are non-voting.

Isn't 5% somewhat significant chunk? I really wouldn't call it tiny one. Maybe not even small anymore.

It's a good deal for Nvidia, because custom x86 server CPUs have optimization potential for AI computing clusters, which matters now that Nvidia has competitors that they didn't just 2 years ago. I think that the next several years of Nvidia will be ones of fending off growing competition.

They basically baked in a massive investment profit into the deal. When you factor in the stock jump since this announcement, Nvidia has already made billions.

Who are NVidia's competitors? I thought they were the only game in town when it came to CUDA/AI chips.

AMD, Broadcom, Huawei, etc

tbf, If I were Nvidia and antitrust wasn't an issue I'd be tempted to buy the whole thing.

Intel has a market cap just 2.5% of NVDA, so you could give away just 2.5% of your stock to buy the entirety of Intel. It's bonkers.

If that happened I would expect the same success story as with Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger.

There are two scenarios here. In one, the AI bubble bursts (so Nvidia is overpriced now) and almost any value stock deal is good for them. In the other, it doesn't, and this gives them a limited hedge against problems with their most critical strategic partner (TSMC).

It looks like a good deal either way and in any amount. But of course I am no expert.

Market cap was closer to 90B before this deal was announced

INTC is strategically important company. They won't be allowed to fail. Of course, that doesn't mean the stock is a good investment. During the GFC, all the equity holders were wiped out all the bond holders got all their money back. Figure that one out.

That's quite literally why bonds are bonds and equity is equity...

So that's probably it for the dedicated Intel GPUs. :/

Wasn't Nvidia working on their own CPU design? Will they drop that?

They're shipping arm derived cpus and have been for years.

Precursor to full acquisition perhaps...also maybe Jensen play to Trump a bit in this.

If there’s a time to do it, now would be the time with the current administration looking at all the regulatory blowback.

If you wanted to acquire Intel you'd do it now. Maybe Intel's future products are garbage and they do worse - but the upside seems pretty high otherwise. This seems like a bit of a firesale price to acquire an advanced fab and CPU maker. Sure, it's Intel and they haven't been doing great, but companies with solid reliable outlooks don't trade this cheaply.

Ofc I would kind of hope/expect antitrust to object given that Intel makes both GPUs and CPUs, and Nvidia is/has dipped their toes into CPU production as well.

> If you wanted to acquire Intel you'd do it now.

Intel still has to go through a lot of reorg (i.e. massive cuts) to get to a happy place, and this is what their succession of CEOs have been procrastinating over.

Judging by my linkedin feed the 'a lot of reorg' is underway.

Bluntly, Intel has corporate cancer, and it requires removing the actual cancers, not a sort of 20% haircut.

It would be 100% Trump to have Nvidia buy Intel and then announce how good of an investment decision he made by buying a slice of intel.

USA, where the federal government is picking winners and losers by making risky stock bets with public money.

Not even the government at this point. The oligarchs are now in full control of the US and are dividing up their kingdoms. The plans for glulags for detractors are also being placed.

> The plans for glulags for detractors are also being placed.

This needlessly divisive and devoid of any factual basis. No gulags will exist and you know it.