Yesterday’s news that Nvidia and Intel are snuggling up for a glorious alliance could cause some major headaches for the industry.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a press briefing that he was in talks to use Intel foundries to produce GPUs, a development that could see the dogged rivals join forces.
Data centre tech is based around GPUs and Nvidia holds an 81 percent market share.
All this could be problems for others in the industry especially AMD’s data centre supercomputing ambitions and TSMC’s foundry business.
AMD and Nvidia use TSMC’s foundry. AMD’s strategy so far has been to produce cheaper GPUs with a slightly better performance than Nvidia.
TSMC rules the roost as the world’s top GPU foundry, but if Intel’s plans work, it could see some significant competition. If it loses Nvidia that gap might widen.
Intel CEO Kicking Pat Gelsinger told Reuters that Intel is “thrilled for (Nvidia’s) interest in using our foundry capabilities,” and confirmed that discussions between the companies were ongoing. A spokesperson for Intel declined to offer further comment. AMD did not return messages seeking comment.
What this should mean is that AMD will have to lean on Samsung, but the dark satanic rumour mill has been reporting that vendors have low yields from Samsung on the chip side. Samsung is Nvidia’s other top supplier. Intel could be making a play on that business as well, that partner speculated.
