GAME OVER FOR NVIDIA?

Is this unholy alliance between Intel and AMD the beginning of the end for Nvidia? At first glance, it looks as though Nvidia simply cannot respond. It doesn’t make x86-compatible PC processors, and it lacks the required license to do so, even if it wanted to. It seems very unlikely that Intel would pair with Nvidia on a CPU-GPU product. Likewise, why would AMD put Nvidia graphics into a package when it has its own high-performance GPU architectures?

When you think about it, Nvidia can only sell graphics to consumers because Intel and AMD allow it. It’s Intel and AMD that control the platforms and the interfaces that allow GPUs to communicate with CPUs. Eventually, these new CPU-GPU packages may come to dominate the market, with both Intel and AMD doing their own versions based on 100 percent in-house processor and graphics technology. In this scenario, Nvidia is a goner. It has no relevant x86-compatible PC processor technology to call upon.

But hang on: Nvidia is hardly dumb to this possible end game. That’s no doubt why it has pushed hard in recent years to broaden its horizons. ARM chips, chips for conventional cars today and autonomous cars tomorrow, industrial parallel compute through general-purpose GPU products—Nvidia has been working hard on all of this, and more.

On the one hand, it could all come down to how hard Intel will push this new highperformance CPUGPU paradigm, and how quickly the rest of Nvidia’s business can grow to replace dwindling consumer graphics sales. In that case, it’s all rather ironic, given the current strength of Nvidia’s consumer GPU business, and the rosy outlook for PC gaming in general.

But here’s the catch: If Intel can go to AMD for graphics, could Nvidia hit up AMD for CPUs, and create a CPU-GPU package to take on Intel? In the short to medium term, a multi-chip package like the new Intel product looks plausible. Further out, highperformance CPU and GPU tech seems likely to fuse into a single chip, and that may raise licensing problems. Would Nvidia need an x86 license to sell such a chip, even if the CPU part of the design was supplied by AMD?