Intel and Nvidia team up on Intel x86 RTX SoCs for future gaming PCs

Nvidia is also investing $5 billion into Intel

by · TechSpot

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What just happened? Intel has received another massive investment from an unlikely source: Nvidia. Team Green is purchasing $5 billion in Intel common stock at $23.28 per share, part of a collaboration that will see the two companies jointly develop x86 system-on-chips – called Intel x86 RTX SoCs – that integrate Intel CPUs and Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets for a wide range of PCs. Intel will also be building custom x86 data center CPUs for Nvidia to integrate into its AI infrastructure platforms.

Intel says the x86 RTX SoCs will power PCs that demand integration of world-class CPUs and GPUs, i.e., the gaming market. There's no word yet on price, release date, or specifications, but those details could be revealed at a joint press conference taking place at 10am PT.

The partnership will see tighter integration between the companies' architectures using Nvidia's NVLink interface for connecting CPUs and GPUs. NVLink provides much higher bandwidth and lower latency than PCIe. Nvidia's Grace CPU superchip, built with NVLink-C2C, can connect to GPUs at up to 900 GB/s.

The Intel x86 RTX SoC's combination of an x86 CPU chiplet and Nvidia RTX GPU chiplet connected via NVLink sounds like it could be a big rival for AMD's APUs. Like AMD's chips, expect to see the Intel/Nvidia SoC powering gaming laptops, among other devices.

The Intel x86 RTX SoC will likely raise memories of the Kaby Lake-G chip from 2017, which combined x86 Kaby Lake processing cores with AMD's Radeon Vega graphics on a single, compact chip, connected via PCIe 3.0.

Kaby Lake-G

We were pretty impressed with how Kaby Lake-G stacked up to a range of hardware in 2018, but the chips suffered from lack of adoption among OEMs, and the processors required more elaborate cooling designs, which led to longer and more costly development periods. Moreover, the 65W and 100W TDPs seemingly limited what devices the chips appeared in. Kaby Lake-G reached its end-of-life in 2019.

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The Nvidia/Intel collaboration will also see Intel build custom x86 data center CPUs for Nvidia that it will sell as its own products.

Nvidia is buying Intel's shares at around 6% less than market value. It's unclear how much influence it will have on Team Blue's business decisions as a result of the investment, which is still subject to approval from regulators.

In August, President Trump and Intel announced an agreement that would give the US government a 9.9% stake in the company, amounting to around $8.9 billion – $5.7 billion will come from undistributed CHIPS and Science Act grants, while $3.2 billion is from the Secure Enclave program. The US government won't have a seat on Intel's board, so it's unlikely that Nvidia will. Softbank also purchased $2 billion worth of Intel stock in August.