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This is a death blow to the Intel GPU+AI efforts and should not be allowed by the regulators. It is clear that Intel needs the downstream, low-cost GPU market s
by littlecranky67 1y ago
This is a death blow to the Intel GPU+AI efforts and should not be allowed by the regulators. It is clear that Intel needs the downstream, low-cost GPU market segment to have a portfolio of AI chips based on chiplets, where most defective ones end up in the consumer grade GPUs based on manufacturing yield. NVidias interest is now for Intel not to enter either the GPU market, nor the AI market - which Intel was preparing for with its GPU efforts in recent years.
- dagmx 1y agoThe regulators want this because it’s bolstering the last domestic owned fab. Any down the road repercussions be damned from their perspective.
- bogwog 1y agoIntel had an opportunity to differentiate themselves by offering more VRAM than Nvidia is willing to put in their consumer cards. It seemed like that was where Battlemage was going. But now, are they really going to undermine this partnership for that? Their GPUs probably aren't going to become a cash cow anytime soon, but this thing probably will. The mindset among American business leaders of the past two decades has been to prioritize short-term profits above all else.
- pchangr 1y agoI remember when I was studying for an MBA.. a professor was talking about the intangible value of a brand .. and finance.. and how they would reflect on each other .. At some point we were decomposing the parts of a balance sheet and they asked if one could sell the goodwill to invest in something else .. and the answer was of course .. no… well.. America has proven us wrong .. the way you sell the goodwill is to basically enshittification.. you quickly burn all your brand reputation by lowering your costs with shittier products .. your goodwill goes to 0 but your income increases so stock go up .. the CEO gets a fat bonus for it .. even tho the company itself is destroyed .. then the CEO quickly abandons ship and does the same on their next company .. rinse and repeat… infinite money!
- poslathian 1y agoWe always called this “monetizing the brand” and it’s been annoying me since at least when Sperry when private equity and the shoes stopped being multi-year daily drivers
- etempleton 1y agoIt may be that Nvidia doesn’t really see Intel as a competitor. Intel serve a part of the GPU market that Nvidia has no interest in. This reminds me a bit of Microsoft’s investment into Apple. Microsoft avoided the scorn of regulators by keeping Apple around as a competitor and if they succeed, great, they make money off of the deal.
- justincormack 1y agoConsumer gpus are totally different products from the high end gpus now. Intel has failed on the gpu market and has effectively zero market share, so it is not actually clear there is an antitrust issue in that market. It would be nice if there was more competition but there are other players like AMD and a long tail of smaller ones
- tw04 1y ago>Consumer gpus are totally different products from the high end gpus now. Intel has failed on the gpu market and has effectively zero market share, so it is not actually clear there is an antitrust issue in that market. It would be nice if there was more competition but there are other players like AMD and a long tail of smaller ones I'm sorry that's just not correct. Intel is literally just getting started in the GPU market, and their last several releases have been nearly exactly what people are asking for. Saying "they've lost" when the newest cards have been on the market for less than a month is ridiculous. If they are even mediocre at marketing, the Arc Pro B50 has a chance to be an absolute game changer for devs who don't have a large budget: https://www.servethehome.com/intel-arc-pro-b50-review-a-16gb-sff-mini-gpu/ https://www.servethehome.com/intel-arc-pro-b50-review-a-16gb... I have absolutely no doubt Nvidia sees that list of "coming features" and will do everything they can to kill that roadmap.
- bigyabai 1y ago224 GB/s 128 bit The monkey's paw curls... I love GPU differentiation, but this is one of those areas where Nvidia is justified shipping less VRAM. With less VRAM, you can use fewer memory controllers to push higher speeds on the same memory! For instance, both the B50 and the RTX 2060 use GDDR6 memory. But the 2060 has a 192-bit memory bus, and enjoys ~336 GB/s bandwidth because of it.
- privatelypublic 1y agoTell me again, how fast can you move data from system ram to vram?
- lvl155 1y agoIntel doesn’t deserve anything. They deserve to disappear based on how they ran the company as a monopoly. No lessons were learned.
- iends 1y agoThis is likely true in a vacuum, but US national security concerns means the US needs Intel.
- leoc 1y agoThat was quite a long time ago! Intel going down the chutes now isn’t an effective punishment for how it behaved under Andy Grove and won’t deter others from Grove-like behaviour. Instead it’ll just mean even less restraint on any of the big players with market power now, like nVidia, AMD and TSMC.
- benced 1y agoThe likelihood intel AI was going to catch up with efforts like AWS Trainium, let alone Nvidia was already vanishingly small. This gives intel a chance at maintaining leading edge fab technologies. I feel bad for gamers - I’ve been considering buying a B580 - but honestly the consumer welfare of that market is a complete sidenote.
- overfeed 1y ago> The likelihood intel AI was going to catch up with efforts like AWS Trainium, let alone Nvidia ...and yet Nvidia is not gambling with the odds. Intel could have challenged Nvidia on performance-per-dollar or per watt, even if they failed to match performance in absolute terms (see AMD's Zen 1 vs Intel)
- benced 1y agoYou misunderstand enterprise GPUs. Their cost of ownership is dominated by electricity - they're already optimized for price per watt.
- delusional 1y ago> This gives intel a chance at maintaining leading edge fab technologies. I don't think so: > The chip giant hasn’t disclosed whether it will use Intel Foundry to produce any of these products yet. It seems pretty likely this is an x86 licensing strategy for nvidia. I doubt they're going to be manufacturing anything on intel fabs. I even wonder if this is a play to get an in with Trump by "supporting" his nationalizing intel strategy.
- nickysielicki 1y agonvidia doesn’t need x86, they’re moving forward on aarch64 and won’t look back. For example, one of the headlines from CUDA 13 is that sbsa can be targeted from all toolkits, not as a separate download, which is important for making it easy to target grace. They have c2c silicon on grace for native host side nvlink. They’re not looking back.
- ErigmolCt 1y agoIf anything, it might be more of a strategic retreat or a hedged bet
- elAhmo 1y agoRegulators? In this administration? There is no such thing.
- NewJazz 1y agoWdym FCC just shut down that antifa Jimmothy Kimmithy.
- SlightlyLeftPad 1y agoNot shut down; regulated.
- TehCorwiz 1y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1plPyJdXKIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1plPyJdXKIY
- lobsterthief 1y agoThe FCC does not have the power to shut down broadcasts based on their content.
- Zacharias030 1y agoostensibly it does.
- cactacea 1y agoSure seems like they're trying to invent one
- lobsterthief 1y agoYes, exactly. They’re exercising a power they don’t have, which should not hold up in a lawful country. Obviously, here we are.
- NewJazz 1y ago
- JustExAWS 1y agoRight now, for the US national interests, our biggest concern is that Intel continues to exist. Intel has been making crappy GPUs for 25 years. They weren’t going to start making great GPUs now. Besides, who would actually use them if they don’t support CUDA? Everyone designs better GPUs than Intel - even Apple’s ARM GPUs have been outpacing Intel for a decade even before the M series.
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago> They weren’t going to start making great GPUs now. But that's exactly what they started doing with Battlemage? It's competitive in its price range and was showing generational strides. > Besides, who would actually use them if they don’t support CUDA? ML is starting to trend away from CUDA towards Vulkan, even on Nvidia hardware, for practical reasons (e.g. performance overhead).
- JustExAWS 1y agoIntel has been trying to make decent GPUs for 25+ years. No company is going to invest billions buying Intel GPUs - especially not the hyper scalers.
- tensor 1y agoWhy does it matter if Intel exists if they can't compete? AMD exists. The only point of hoping they remain is to create an environment of competition as that drives development and progress. Though fair and free markets is not at all what the current regime in the US believes in, instead it will be consolidation, leading waste, and little innovation and progress.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- paxys 1y agoThe US government is itself a major shareholder in Intel, and has every incentive to push Intel stock over its competitors. It's almost a certainty that Nvidia was forced into this deal by the government as well. We are way beyond regulation here.
- lawlessone 1y agoWhat happens now if one of these companies implodes? does it pull everything with it?
- nradov 1y agotoo big to fail
- mmastrac 1y ago"too big to fail" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergrande_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergrande_Group
- YeahThisIsMe 1y agoWhy would anything that isn't Intel implode? And what's "everything"?
- smegger001 1y agoa plateauing in AI development leading to another AI Winter causing dotcom bubble 2 electric boogaloo.
- yvdriess 1y agoIf anything that would be a boost to Intel. One of their problems is GPU capex sucking the air out of the room.
- smegger001 1y ago
- yalogin 1y agoI don’t follow how it’s a death knell to intel AI chips. Nvidia bought shares, not a board seat. May be that’s the plan, but if you take the example of Microsoft buying apple shares that only gave apple a lifeline to build better. I do understand nvidia wants to have the whole gpu market to themselves but how will they do it?
- dragonwriter 1y ago> Nvidia bought shares, not a board seat. I think the assumption there is that the strategic partnership that is part of the deal would in effect preclude Intel from aggressively competing with NVIDIA in that market, perhaps with the belief that the US governments financial stake in Intel would also lead to reduced anti-trust scrutiny of such an agreement not to compete.
- littlecranky67 1y agoThey literally bought board seats - not today, but shares entitle you to vote on the board members on the next shareholder meeting. And 5$bn of shares buy you a lot of votes.
- andirk 1y ago5$bn may not buy a huge amount of voting power, but if there are close votes on important things then it could be enough to affect the company. Keeping ones enemies closer, regardless of voting, can also help overall.
- alexnewman 1y agoWait what. Intel GPU+AI efforts. People had to come together to fund the abandoned Intel SW development team. Intel GPUs are great at what they do but they are no nvidia. I don't even think that was on the roamdap. Also you don't know what nvidia wants. Maybe they want to flood the low end to destroy AMD benefiting consumers. We just don't know
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- stevenally 1y agoNVidia only owns 4% of Intel. They won't be able to dictate it's direction.
- b112 1y agoDoes Nvidia now have controlling interest? A bunch of board seats? Why would it matter if not? This is a nice partnership. Each gets something the other lacks. And it strengthens domestic manufacturing. Taiwan is going to be subumed soon, and we need more domestic production now.
- aDyslecticCrow 1y agoThe alternative is currently looking like cutting up of intel into piecemeal to make a quick buck just to stay afloat. The GPU division is not profitable and may be destroyed if overall financials don't improve.
- usef- 1y agoThis isn't about GPU competition, it's about fab competition (which is in far more dire of a situation). Intel can no longer fund new process nodes by itself, and no customers want to take the business risk to build their product on a (very difficult) new node when tsmc exists. They're in a chicken and egg situation. (see also https://stratechery.com/2025/u-s-intel/ https://stratechery.com/2025/u-s-intel/ )