Intel and Nvidia promise a new age of mobile gaming, but there are reasons to be cautious.
What’s the point of competition anymore? Nvidia may still be trying to make its own CPUs. Intel could have beefed up its Arc GPUs around the corner. But now the two U.S.-based chipmakers plan to make SoCs, or system-on-chips, combining each company’s specialty. While we’re all curious about what this means for the future of PCs, you’ll need to wait a good long while to see what form the new chips from the new Wonder Twins will take.
Nvidia is effectively netting a $5 billion stake in Intel, a deal that acts as another shot of adrenaline for the beleaguered chipmaker. The investment is like a one-two punch following President Donald Trump’s efforts to bend the company to his will with the U.S. government’s $11 billion investment. During a Q&A press conference held on Thursday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stressed, “The Trump Administration had no involvement in the partnership at all.” The partnership supplies Intel’s x86 microarchitecture for the purpose of building more energy- and water-dependent data center infrastructure. For the rest of us who actually use Intel and Nvidia’s products on a daily basis, the pair promise to craft new SoCs using Intel’s CPU know-how and Nvidia’s graphics capabilities.
The first thing we have to acknowledge is that anything that comes out of this partnership will take time to develop. In a statement, an Intel spokesperson told me that the company doesn’t have any real product timelines to share. Either way, this will be a multi-generational platform that “will take some time” to develop. Industry analyst Patrick Moorhead told PCWorld he doesn’t expect these new SoCs to rear their heads for at least two to three years.These chimera-esque chips will take time
It’s not as if Intel and Nvidia haven’t been dancing partners on previous occasions, but this new marriage will have both companies learning all new moves—perhaps they’ll need to take a salsa class. Nvidia was once much bigger on integrated GPUs, but after years of losing out on access to MacBooks, it strayed away from doing any kind of PC that didn’t have something to do with graphics. The latest rumors have suggested Nvidia was working on an ARM-based CPU for PC, though those plans may be delayed to 2026. We doubt the new partnership will change that.
