Intel and Nvidia have been working on the jointly developed processors for client and data center products for about a year now as both companies see huge opportunities behind their Intel x86 RTX SoCs and custom Nvidia x86 data center processors. Although the Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a press call that the Trump administration was pleased with the collaboration between two leading U.S. companies, it had nothing to do with it.
Trump not involved
The work began around a year ago, and preliminary agreements were reached by Intel's then-CEO Pat Gelsinger and Nvidia's Jensen Huang even before that. (A year ago, Joe Biden was president, though no one suggested his administration was involved, either.) Intel and Nvidia are working on custom data center CPUs that Nvidia will integrate into its AI platforms as well as GPU tiles that Intel will integrate into its upcoming client processors. In both cases CPUs and GPUs will use Nvidia's NVLink technology as an I/O interface. By now, there are three teams working together on the joint projects.
The work is ongoing
"The two technology teams have been discussing and architecting solutions now for probably coming out to a year," said Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia. "The two architecture teams… Well, it is three architecture teams are working across... the CPU architecture, as well as product lines for server and PCs. The architecture work is fairly extensive, and the teams are really excited about the new architecture. The teams have been working for a while and we are excited about the announcement today."
As Huang mentioned teams working on a CPU architecture as well as client and data center product lines, we figure out that Nvidia wants rather deep customizations of Intel's Xeons to meet the needs of its AI platforms.
The involvement of a CPU architecture team highlights the depth of the partnership between Intel and Nvidia as well as indicates that the CPU company is implementing rather deep optimizations required by next-generation AI platforms. Given Nvidia's history with Grace and Vera CPUs (custom Arm) and the high bandwidth needs of its next-gen GPUs (e.g. Rubin, Feynman, post-Feynman, etc.), it is reasonable to expect tailored cache structures, memory IO, and coherency protocols on these x86 CPUs.
Such a deep collaboration probably means that custom Intel processors will be used by Nvidia sometimes in the post-Vera Rubin platform era. We would certainly expect Nvidia's data center GPU team to work with Intel as well, but Huang never mentioned one during the call, probably because Feynman GPUs have already been defined by now.
Yet, he mentioned that there are two more teams working on product lines for server and PC products, which probably points to data center system level architecture team on Nvidia's side as well as client CPU/system level architecture team on Intel's side.
While the collaboration between Intel and Nvidia on the data center front is a multi-faceted cross-organizational effort, the timing to its fruition is tied to emergence of Intel's custom CPUs for Nvidia.
As for the joint work on client project (or projects), developing an Intel CPU with Nvidia GPU chiplet will take at least three to four years from drawing board to volume production. The collaboration requires deep integration across SoC fabrics, dimensions, performance/power consumption targets, packaging technologies (Foveros, EMIB), and software stacks from both companies. The collaboration likely began in 2024, so the first products could hit the market in late 2027 or early 2028.
Hundreds of millions of PCs
While we do not know for sure when Intel and Nvidia plan to come up with jointly developed products, it looks like they intend to address a broad range of applications. At least, Jensen Huang said that that the two companies plan to build CPUs that could address the vast majority of notebooks, which points to hundreds of millions of devices.
"Just the notebook market is 150 million notebooks sold each year," said Huang. "So that kind of gives you a sense of the scale of the work that we are going to do here. We are going to address the consumer market, we are going to address a vast majority of that consumer PC market, consumer PC notebook market."
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