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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Nvidia buys $5B in Intel stock in seismic deal
littlecranky67 wrote 6 min 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.
HarHarVeryFunny wrote 9 min ago:
I'm guessing NVidia didn't do this by choice. Propping up Intel doesn't
seem in their best interests, nor does it do their share holders any
favors by diluting their rapid growth.
juancn wrote 30 min ago:
AMD is much stronger in unified memory architectures than Nvidia at
this point.
It kinda makes sense, with the AI push.
I wonder what this means for the ARC line of GPUs?
aenopix wrote 52 min ago:
Capitalism, all at the hands of just a bunch of people.
belter wrote 1 hour 1 min ago:
NVIDIA is Jensen Huang life, and he is probably the best CEO in the
USA. But he should be careful. Possible Shareholders lawsuits come with
Discovery. NVIDIA sales to Coreweave for example, a company they have
shares on is starting to look a lot like self-dealing.
Also, since this Intel deal makes no sense for NVIDIA, a good observer
would notice that lately, he seems to spend more time on Air Force One
than with NVIDIA teams. The leak of any evidence, showing this was an
investment ordered by the White House, will make his company hostage of
future demands from the current corrupt administration. The timing is
already incredibly suspicions.
We will know for sure he become a hostage, if the next NVIDIA
investment is on World Liberty Financial.
"Anatomy of Two Giant Deals: The U.A.E. Got Chips. The Trump Team Got
Crypto Riches." -
URI [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/us/politics/trump-uae-chips...
rhetocj23 wrote 57 min ago:
The entire AI ecosystem that is being built out looks very suspect
frankly..
tasuki wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
> Nvidia announced that it will buy $5 billion in Intel common stock at
$23.28 per share, representing a roughly 5% ownership stake in Intel.
(Intel stock is now up 33% in premarket trading.)
Why/how is INTC premarket up from $24.90 around 30% (to $32), when
Nvidia is buying the stock at $23.28 ? Who is selling the stock?
I suppose the Intel board decided this? Why did they sell under the
current market price? Didn't the Intel board have fiduciary duty to get
as good a price from Nvidia as possible? If Nvidia buying stock moves
it up so much, it seems like a bad deal to sell the stock for so
little.
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote 1 hour 15 min ago:
It's typical in these situations that the price per stock is
negotiated, with current SP as a starting point. It's fairly unusual,
I think, for the company selling stock to get a price significantly
higher than market price. It's more typical that there's a slight
discount. At least that's been the case for every stock I owned where
dilution has occured. We also don't know yet when exactly this deal
was negotiated and approved, so it's hard to actually say.
Considering where INTC has been very recently(below $20), $23.28
seems very reasonable to me.
The reason the stock surged up past $30 is the general market's
reaction to the news, and subsequent buying pressure, not the stock
transaction itself. It seems likely that once the exuberance cools
down, the SP will pull back, where to I can't say. Somewhere between
$25 and $30 would be my bet, but this is not financial advice, I'm
just spitballing here.
glimshe wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
Are we getting a new iteration of sub-$200 mini PCs with an RTX
chiplet?! That would be an amazing replacement for my N100!
OrvalWintermute wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
I'm taking this investment as a validation of the competitiveness of
AMD's APUs & Apple's Silicon.
bilekas wrote 2 hours 1 min ago:
This really wasn't a surprise, nVidia has seemed to be itching for a
meaningful entry to the CPU market and when intel's CEO started undoing
all and any future investment in the company it was clear everything
was being setup for a sell off.
5 Billion is just a start but this is a gift for nVidia to eventually
squire intel.
xbar wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
I think if Nvidia wanted to acquire Intel, they would acquire Intel.
Intel has never been so cheap relative to the kinds of IP assets that
Nvidia values and probably will not be ever again if this and other
investments keep it afloat.
Trump's FTC would not block.
You write with proper case-sensitivity for their titles which
suggests some historic knowledge of the two. They have been very
close partners on CPU+GPU for decades. This investment is not
fundamentally changing that.
The current CEO is more like a CFO--cutting costs and eliminating
waste. There are two exits from that: sell off, as you say, and
re-investment in the products of most likely future profit. This
could be a signal that the latter is the plan and that the
competitive aspects of the nVidia-intel partnership will be sidelined
for a while.
gdiamos wrote 2 hours 2 min ago:
best news i've heard in days
saejox wrote 2 hours 6 min ago:
I hope this isn't "Shut-up" money to end ARC gpu development. i have an
A770, i am very happy with it.
bilekas wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
It's absolutely not, the ARC line is not a threat in any way to
nVidia, it's to get it's feet into the CPU market without the initial
setup costs and research it would take to start from scratch.
They will be dominating AMD now on both fronts if things go smoothly
for them.
Symmetry wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
SemiAccruate reported that NVidia had been dipping its toes into
manufacturing its products using Intel's fabs several months ago, I'd
assume that that's related.
alex1138 wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
I know AMD used to be lacking but these days I guess they're probably
the go-to on Linux because they share changes with the community
I don't like the idea of using Intel given their lack of disclosure for
Spectre/Meltdown and some of their practices (towards AMD)
wheybags wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
I wonder what this means for Intel's Arc lineup. Would be a bit crazy
to have privileged access to a competitor's roadmap through just owning
a chunk of them. I also have to admit I really hope they dont cancel
them. A triopoly is at least better than a duopoly (or realistically, a
monopoly as AMD's competitiveness in gpus is pretty questionable)
Workaccount2 wrote 31 min ago:
It probably kills any prospect of Intel releasing a market disrupter
card that many were calling for - a 64GB or 92GB card with even
middling performance for under $1k.
It's pretty clear AMD and Nvidia are gatekeeping memory so they can
iterate over time and protect their datacenter cards.
Intel had a prime opportunity to blow this up.
vid wrote 1 hour 8 min ago:
That's what I think of, along with favour from their new investment
sibling, the US government. AMD doesn't want to be super competitive,
they like their margins and being second choice in a hypetastic
market. Even though Arc has very low adoption, it was making signs of
doing scrappy things, like enabling two 24GB GPUs on one card from
third party vendors, which got the hobby/upstart community pretty
excited. Ultimately it's not a real market giving the people what
they want via competition, it's all contrived by politics and the
biggest players.
JCM9 wrote 2 hours 25 min ago:
Intel is a strategically important company for the United States. This
smells like a token investment to appease the US government. Not saying
itâs bad, but very much looks like that.
adrr wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
Only the fab part is. Intel needs to separate the two. Maybe
Nvidia, AMD, or Qualcomm can buy the the fab part.
Keyframe wrote 11 min ago:
AMD sold off its foundries, why would they buy some again?
HDThoreaun wrote 36 min ago:
Being fabless is a huge strategic advantage to chip designers.
Intel's biggest problem has been that theyre stuck on shitty fabs.
Nvidia, amd, and qualcomm do not want to be in that position.
mschuster91 wrote 1 hour 35 min ago:
Why would either of these three be interested in buying a fab? The
only other large player with its own fab is Samsung and Samsung has
the same problem that Intel has, namedly a fab that is nowhere near
close to TSMC.
I agree that Intel would be better served to spin off its fab
division, a potential buyer could be the US government for military
and national security relevant projects.
adrr wrote 1 hour 17 min ago:
Someone could be interested. It could also be Global Foundries.
High risk big reward bet which the government is willing to help
mitigate some of the risk with funding.
They just need to separate business units.
DanielHB wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
Not an expert in the area, but I think the highest of the
high-end chips is a big market, but not the biggest market as
revenue for fabs. It is just the most profitable part of the
market.
Maybe this changed with the AI race but there are plenty of
people buying older chips by the millions for all sorts of
products.
seanalltogether wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
It feels like the end is in sight for dedicated graphics chips in
consumer devices. Phones, consoles, and now Apple silicon are proving
that SoC designs with unified memory and focused thermals are a winning
strategy for efficiency and speed. Nvidia may be happy enough to move
the graphics strategy onto an SoC and keep discrete boards just for AI.
esseph wrote 1 hour 11 min ago:
Yet here I am just frothing for GPUs
smugma wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
Give up 0.1% of shares to get 5% of Intel.
Seems to be an easy bet, if for no other reason than to make the US
Government (Trump) happy. Trump gets to tout his +30% return on
investment.
igtztorrero wrote 2 hours 30 min ago:
This is the first step that Nvidia takes to devour Intel.
whycome wrote 2 hours 33 min ago:
Also, the US Govt bought $8.9B in stock last month I guess
URI [1]: https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/in...
ecocentrik wrote 1 hour 33 min ago:
Correction: Renegotiated a prior loan as a $8.9B stock purchase.
phkahler wrote 1 hour 3 min ago:
Does that mean Intel doesn't ever have to pay it back?
KeplerBoy wrote 48 min ago:
It means Intel already paid it back. The dilution hurt all other
owners.
jgalt212 wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
INTC is strategically important company. They won't be allowed to
fail. Of course, that doesn't mean the stock is a good investment.
During the GFC, all the equity holders were wiped out all the bond
holders got all their money back. Figure that one out.
baq wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
That's quite literally why bonds are bonds and equity is equity...
BoredPositron wrote 2 hours 43 min ago:
So that's probably it for the dedicated Intel GPUs. :/
boxerab wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
scrlk wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
> For personal computing, Intel will build and offer to the market x86
system-on-chips (SOCs) that integrate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets. These
new x86 RTX SOCs will power a wide range of PCs that demand integration
of world-class CPUs and GPUs. [1] Whatâs old is new again: back in
2017, Intel tried something similar with AMD (Kaby Lake-G). They paired
a Kaby Lake CPU with a Vega GPU and HBM, but the product flopped:
URI [1]: https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1750/nv...
URI [2]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-discontinue-kaby-lake-...
phkahler wrote 1 hour 11 min ago:
I don't think this is Intel trying to save itself, it's nVidia. Intel
GPUs have been in 3rd place for a long time, but their integrated
graphics are widely available and come in 2nd place because nVidia
can't compete in the x86 space. Intel graphics have been closing the
gap with AMD and are now within what? A factor of 2 or less (1.5?)
IMHO we will soon see more small/quiet PCs without a slot for a
graphics card, relying on integrated graphics. nVidia has no place in
that future. But now, by dropping $5B on Intel they can get into some
of these SoCs and not become irrelevant.
The nice thing for Intel is that they might be able to claim graphics
superiority in SoC land since they are currently lagging in CPU.
jonbiggums22 wrote 31 min ago:
Way back in the mid-late 2000s Intel CPUs could be used with third
party chipsets not manufactured by Intel. This had been going on
forever but the space was particularly wild with Nvidia being the
most popular chipset manufacturer for AMD and also making in-roads
for Intel CPUs. It was an important enough market than when ALi
introduced AMD chipsets that were better than Nvidia's they
promptly bought the company and spun down operations.
This was all for naught as AMD purchased ATi, shutting out all
other chipsets and Intel did the same. Things actually looked
pretty grim for Nvidia at this point in time. AMD was making moves
that suggested APUs were the future and Intel started releasing
platforms with very little PCIe connectivity, prompting Nvidia to
build things like the Ion platform that could operate over an
anemic pcie 1x link. There were really were the beginnings of
strategic moves to lock Nvidia out of their own market.
Fortunately, Nvidia won a lawsuit against Intel that required them
to have pcie 16x connectivity on their main platforms for 10 years
or so and AMD put out non-competitive offerings in the CPU space
such that the APU take off never happened. If Intel had actually
developed their integrated GPUs or won that lawsuit or if AMD had
actually executed Nvidia might well be an also-ran right around
now.
To their credit, Nvidia really took advantage of their competitors
inability to press their huge strategic advantage during that time.
I think we're in a different landscape at the moment. Neither AMD
nor Intel can afford boot Nvidia since consumers would likely
abandon them for whoever could still slot in an Nvidia card. High
performance graphics is the domain of add-in boards now and will be
for awhile. Process node shrinks aren't as easy and cooling
solutions are getting crazy.
But Nvidia has been shut out of the new handheld market and haven't
been a good total package for consoles as SoC both rule the day in
those spaces so I'm not super surprised at the desire for this
pairing. But I did think nvidia had given up these ambitions was
planning to try to build an adjacent ARM based platform as a
potential escape hatch.
ninetyninenine wrote 14 min ago:
nvidia does build SOCs already. The AGXs and other offerings. I'm
curious why they want intel despite having that technical
capability of building SOCs.
I realize the AGX is more of a low power solution and it's
possible that nvidia is still technically limited when building
SOCs but this is just speculation.
Does anybody know actual ground truth reasoning why Nvidia is
buying Intel despite the fact that nvidia can make their own
SOCs?
wirybeige wrote 1 hour 8 min ago:
Xe2 is superior to current AMD integrated already
yujzgzc wrote 56 min ago:
I think the comparison was between Nvidia standalone graphics
chips and Intel integrated graphics capabilities.
joz1-k wrote 1 hour 44 min ago:
RIP Arc and Gaudi. There is no other way how to read this. Fewer
competitors => higher prices.
jonbiggums22 wrote 28 min ago:
I think it is bad news for the GPU market (AMD has had a beachhead
with their integrated solution here as they've lost out elsewhere)
but good for x86 which I've worried would be greatly diminished as
Intel became less competitive.
philistine wrote 35 min ago:
Absolutely. This is terrible news for high emission gamers, who
have been living under the boot of Nvidia for decades.
herodoturtle wrote 1 hour 51 min ago:
> Intel tried something similar with AMD (Kaby Lake-G). They paired a
Kaby Lake CPU with a Vega GPU and HBM, but the product flopped
/me picturing Khaby Lame gesturing his hands at an obvious
workaround.
linuxftw wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
To me, this just validates what AMD has been doing for over a decade.
Integrated GPUs for personal computing are the way forward.
ddalex wrote 2 hours 38 min ago:
That was targeted at supporting more tightly integrated and
performant Macbooks .... it flopped because Apple came up with M1,
not because it was bad per se.
JonChesterfield wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
The ryzen APUs had a rocky start but are properly good now, the
concept is sound
intvocoder wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
apple never shipped a product with that, but it made for an
excellent hackintosh
DarkmSparks wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
After the arm buyout fell through, I guess this is the next best thing.
Plus a good deal for nvidia since Intel is pretty desperate at this
point.
Sol- wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
Nowadays I always wonder to what extent such deals are actually driven
by market considerations and to what extent it's catering to the Trump
administration. Token investments into this state enterprise named
Intel seems to be a practical way to cater goodwill with the autocrats.
qzw wrote 2 hours 49 min ago:
Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the
dumps? This is giving similar vibes. That deal was arguably what saved
Apple near its nadir. Iâm not a fan of Intelâs past monopolistic
practices, but for the sake of sustaining competition in the CPU/GPU
market, I hope this deal works out for them even half as well as the MS
deal did for Apple.
aenopix wrote 52 min ago:
Competition?
jeffwask wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
It's even more ironic when you remember in 2005 the tables were
turned, and Intel was trying to buy Nvidia.
xbmcuser wrote 1 hour 27 min ago:
Nah I have feeling this is part of the result of the arm twisting to
be allowed to sell to China.
mrtksn wrote 1 hour 33 min ago:
Does intel have someone who will return and change the course of the
company or return to its original mission or something of that sort?
sigwinch wrote 1 hour 30 min ago:
Oh, I bet Elon has been handed some ideas.
znpy wrote 1 hour 58 min ago:
> Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in
the dumps?
Had Apple failed, Microsoft would probably have been found to have a
clear monopolistic position. And microsoft was already in hot waters
due to InternetExplorer IIRC.
rhetocj23 wrote 1 hour 0 min ago:
Yep. MSFT needed Apple because of Anti-trust issues.
Apples demise wouldve nailed the case.
jasode wrote 2 hours 5 min ago:
>Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the
dumps? This is giving similar vibes.
Doesn't feel the same because the 1997 investment was arranged by
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. He had a long personal relationship
with Bill Gates so could just call him to drop the outstanding
lawsuits and get a commitment for future Office versions on the Mac.
Basically, Steve Jobs at relatively young age of 42 was back at Apple
in "founder mode" and made bold moves that the prior CEO Gil Amelio
couldn't do.
Intel doesn't have the same type of leadership. Their new CEO is a
career finance/investor instead of a "new products new innovation"
type of leader. This $5 billion investment feels more like the
result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they
"politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less
restrictions selling chips to China.
teiuh3839879 wrote 36 min ago:
Except ofc. China has banned Nvidia.
URI [1]: https://www.ft.com/content/12adf92d-3e34-428a-8d61-c916951...
jszymborski wrote 1 hour 29 min ago:
> This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of
back-channel discussions with the US government where they
"politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less
restrictions selling chips to China.
Stinks of Mussolini-style Corporatism to me.
philistine wrote 32 min ago:
Yeah, the thing about the economy is it's too big for one mind to
grasp, you need statistics to make sense of it in aggregate.
If you fiddle and concentrate only on the top performers, the
bottom falls out. Most of the US economy is still in small
companies.
kjksf wrote 58 min ago:
You try to pin this (hypothetical) as fascism.
Let's assume Trump admin pressured Nvidia to invest in intel.
Chips act (voted by Democrats / Biden) gave Intel up to $7.8
billion of YOUR money (taxes) in form of direct grants.
Was it more of "Mussolini-style corporatism" to you or not?
jszymborski wrote 34 min ago:
There's big difference between government allocating tax payer
dollars by passing a bill than a president using their
influence to force dealings between corporate entities that
benefit the ruling party.
unethical_ban wrote 45 min ago:
The parent comment is speculation. But yes, speculatively, a
legislative act of investment would be less authoritarian than
the whims of an executive that puts tariffs on your product
constantly unless you do what he says.
MrBrobot wrote 18 min ago:
Is the method by which itâs communicated what gives you
negative feelings? Because this is an approach to handling
the labor dumping thatâs been allowed in nearly every
industry since the 1980s, and itâs been used numerous times
in the US and abroad. They typically only offer temporary
relief, while domestic industries should be adjusting and
better trade deals get negotiated. The last I checked,
thatâs been happening to some degree⦠but it also
probably needs to be supported by the ability for companies
to borrow money, which the Fed (until recently) seemed hell
bent on preventing, while we continued to watch the job
market burn to the ground. So cash flush businesses investing
in each other to keep competition alive seems like a positive
here. Maybe thatâs just me?
tremon wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
I don't think that's an apt comparison, given that Microsoft and
Apple were more direct competitors than Intel and Nvidia; the latter
have a more symbiotic relationship. I think the rationale is closer
to the competitor of my competitor is my friend -- they face two
threats by AMD growing larger in the CPU market:
- a bigger R&D budget for their main competitor in the GPU market
- since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more
dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.
scrlk wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
> since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more
dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.
This is why they built the Grace CPU - noting that they're using
Arm's Neoverse V2 cores rather than their own design.
readams wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
Here's Nvidia's CPUs, which are increasingly a required part of
their data center offerings:
URI [1]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/
vjvjvjvjghv wrote 2 hours 27 min ago:
All they need now is a CEO like Steve Jobsâ¦
__turbobrew__ wrote 29 min ago:
Jensen moves to intel â¦
JonChesterfield wrote 2 hours 51 min ago:
I can think of _nothing_ with a better shot at unseating nvidia than a
merger with intel. Fingers crossed for ever closer union between the
two.
imiric wrote 2 hours 41 min ago:
You can't be serious.
Intel was well on its way to be a considerable threat to NVIDIA with
their Arc line of GPUs, which are getting better and cheaper with
each generation. Perhaps not in the enterprise and AI markets yet,
but certainly on the consumer side.
This news muddies this approach, and I see it as a misstep for both
Intel and for consumers. Intel is only helping NVIDIA, which puts
them further away from unseating them than they were before.
Competition is always a net positive for consumers, while mergers are
always a net negative. This news will only benefit shareholders of
both companies, and Intel shareholders only in the short-term. In the
long-term, it's making NVIDIA more powerful.
mschuster91 wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
> This news muddies this approach, and I see it as a misstep for
both Intel and for consumers.
Consumers still have AMD as an alternative for very decent and
price attractive GPUs (and CPUs).
adrian_b wrote 24 min ago:
Not everybody wants GPUs for games or for AI.
AMD has always followed closely NVIDIA in crippling their cheap
GPUs for any other applications.
After many years of continuously decreasing performance of the
"consumer" GPUs, only Intel has offered in the Battlemage GPUs
FP64 performance comparable with what could be easily obtained 10
years ago, but no longer today.
Therefore, if the Intel GPUs disappear, then the choices in GPUs
will certainly become much more restricted than today. AMD has
almost never attempted to compete with NVIDIA in features, but
whenever NVIDIA dropped some feature, so did AMD.
tremon wrote 2 hours 6 min ago:
I'm not convinced. The latest Battlemage benchmarks I've seen put
the B580 at the same performance as the RTX 4060 (which is a two
years old entry-level card) but with 50% more power consumption
(80W vs 125W average). It's good to have more than one open source
supporting graphics vendor, but I don't think Nvidia is losing any
sleep over Intel's GPU offerings.
HDThoreaun wrote 34 min ago:
nvidia's margins are over 80% for datacenter products. If Intel
can produce chips with enough vram and performance on par with
nvidia from 2 years ago at 30% margins theyd steal a lot of
business, if they can figure out the cuda side of things.
throwawaythekey wrote 1 hour 24 min ago:
Battlemage had the best perf/% and most the driver issues from
Alchemist had been ironed out. Another generation or two of
steady progress and intel have a big winner on their hands.
Intel's foundry costs are probably competitive with nvidia too -
nvidia has too much opportunity cost if nothing else.
ComputerGuru wrote 34 min ago:
What is performance per percent?
Retric wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
Mergers where one company is on the verge of failing can be a net
positive for consumers. Most obviously this happens when banks
fail and peopleâs bank cards still work etc and at least
initially the branches stay open.
Intel isnât at that point, but the companies trajectory isnât
looking good. Iâd happily sacrifice ARC to keep a duopoly in
CPUâs.
JonChesterfield wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
I'm sure Larrabee will be superb any year now. The Xeon phi will
rise again. For supporting evidence, the success of Aurora. Weren't
the loss-leading arc GPUs cancelled as well? Maybe that only one
generation of them, it does look like some are on the market now.
I think this partnership will damage nvidia. It might damage intel,
but given they're circling the drain already, it's hard to make
matters worse.
It's probably bad for consumers in every dimension.
Or to take the opposite, if nvidia rolled over intel and fired
essentially everyone in the management chain and started trying to
run the fabs themselves, good chance they'd turn the ship around
and become even more powerful than they already are.
whatever1 wrote 1 hour 32 min ago:
Has Nvidia has ran any fab successfully ?
JonChesterfield wrote 1 hour 12 min ago:
Nope. It will/would be a learning curve. They'd probably seed
it with strategic hires from TSMC.
imiric wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
> It might damage intel, but given they're circling the drain
already, it's hard to make matters worse.
How was Intel "circling the drain"?
They have a very competitive offering of CPUs, APUs, and GPUs,
and the upcoming Panther Lake and Nova Lake architectures are
very promising. Their products compete with AMD, NVIDIA, and ARM
SoCs from the likes of Apple.
Intel may have been in a rut years ago, but they've recovered
incredibly well.
This is why I'm puzzled by this decision, and as a consumer, I
would rather use a fully Intel system than some bastardized
version that also involves NVIDIA. We've seen how well that works
with Optimus.
pengaru wrote 49 min ago:
When your own most competitive products are being made by your
competitor for you, while you still have the cost center of
running your own production fabs incapable of producing your
most competitive products, and receiving bailouts just to keep
the lights on...
Some would say that's circling the drain.
JonChesterfield wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
None of their products are competitive, they fired the CEO who
was meant to save them, fired tens of thousands of their
engineers, sold off massive chunks of the company, they're
still bleeding money and begging for state support?
Also their network cards no longer work properly which is
deeply aggravating as that used to be something I could rely
on, just bought some realtek ones to work around the intel ones
falling over.
gregoryl wrote 1 hour 8 min ago:
I have bad news about realtek networking...
ericmay wrote 2 hours 49 min ago:
They arenât merging - this is Nvidia ensuring their tech is in
Intel chips.
rm445 wrote 1 hour 32 min ago:
Might rather see it the other way around - Nvidia getting license
to create products with x86(_64) CPUs integrated in the silicon.
Nvidia are the big boy in this transaction and they'll get what
they want out of it. But I can see the attraction for Intel.
JonChesterfield wrote 2 hours 45 min ago:
Yes indeed. It's still a step in that direction that opens up a
bunch of communication channels between the execs of the two
companies. Things move slowly.
fidotron wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
Possibly more curious than the investment:
> Nvidia will also have Intel build custom x86 data center CPUs for its
AI products for hyperscale and enterprise customers.
Hell has frozen over at Intel. Actually listening to people that want
to buy your stuff, whatever next? Presumably someone over there doesn't
want the AI wave to turn into a repeat of their famous success with
mobile.
In the event Intel ever do get US based fabrication semi competitive
again (and the national security motivation for doing so is intense)
nVidia will likely have to be a major customer, so this does make
sense. I remain doubtful that Intel can pull it off, and it will have
to come from someone else.
geertj wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
> Actually listening to people that want to buy your stuff, whatever
next?
This is very likely the new culture that LBT is bringing in. This can
only be good.
baq wrote 2 hours 32 min ago:
If you were a big enough customer you could get a SKU for you, too.
E.g. hyperscalers have Xeons which are not available for any other
customers for any price.
fidotron wrote 2 hours 11 min ago:
But what they've completely resisted so far is any non trivial
modification.
They turned down Acorn about the 286, which led to Acorn creating
the Arm, they have turned down various console makers, they turned
down Apple on the iPhone, and so on. In all cases they thought the
opportunities were beneath them.
Intel has always been too much about what they want to sell you,
not what you need. That worked for them when the two aligned over
backwards compat.
Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to a
GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at last.
brookst wrote 1 hour 40 min ago:
Intelâs test for new business ideas has always been: will it
make $1B in the first year?
It leads to mistakes like you mention, where a new market segment
or new entrant is not a sure thing. And then it leads to mistakes
like Larrabee and Optane where they talk themselves into
overconfidence (âobviously this is a great product, we
wouldnât be doing it if it wasnât guaranteed to make $1B in
the first yearâ).
It is very hard to grow a business with zero risk appetite. You
canât take risky high return bets, and you canât acknowledge
the real risk in âsafeâ bets.
actionfromafar wrote 1 hour 29 min ago:
Larrabee could have grown into something very cool if they had
not dropped it and made it available on the open market,
donated to universities and so on. Transputer vibes.
brookst wrote 15 min ago:
Itâs entirely possible that Larrabee could have been the
platform for Transformers. Maybe, maybe not.
But certainly Intel wasnât willing to wait for the market.
Didnât make $1 billion instantly; killed.
keyringlight wrote 49 min ago:
I think for Larrabee it was intel experimenting to find other
markets for their Atom cores, and if there was market for it
they needed to have the tenacity to cultivate it. Similar to
how nvidia took huge amounts of time establishing GPGPU,
CUDA, then machine learning, through to reaping the rewards
over the past few years.
2010-2011 was also the time that AMD were starting to moan a
bit about DX11 and the higher level APIs not being sufficient
to get the most out of GPUs, which led to Mantle/Vulkan/DX12
a few years down the road. Intel did a bit regarding
massively parallel software rendering, with the flexibility
to run on anything x86 and implement features as you liked,
or AMD's efforts for 'fusion' (APU+GPU, after recently
acquiring ATi) or HSA which I seem to recall was about
dispatching different types of computing to the best suited
processor(s) in the system for it. However I got the
impression a lot of development effort is more interested in
progressing on what they already have instead of starting in
a new direction, and game studios want to ship finished and
stable/predictable product, which is where support from intel
would have helped.
mschuster91 wrote 1 hour 41 min ago:
> they have turned down various console makers
The problem is, console manufacturers know precisely how much of
their product they anticipate to sell, and it's usually a lot.
The PlayStation 5 is 80 million units so far.
And at that scale, the console manufacturers want to squeeze
every vendor as hard as they can... and Intel didn't see the need
to engage in a bidding war with AMD that would have given them a
sizable revenue but very little profit margin compared to selling
Xeon CPUs to hyperscalers where Intel has much more leverage to
command higher prices and thus higher margins.
> they turned down Apple on the iPhone
Intel just was (and frankly, still is) unable to compete on the
power envelope with ARM, that's why you never saw x86 take off on
Android as well despite quite a few attempts at it.
Apple only chose to go for Intel with its MacBook line as PowerPC
was practically dead and offered no way to extract more
performance, and they dropped Intel as soon as their own CPUs
were competitive. To get Intel CPUs to the same level of power
efficiency that M-series CPUs have would require a full rework of
the entire CPU infrastructure and external stack, that would
require money that even Intel at its best frankly did not have.
And getting x86 to be power effective enough for a phone? Just
forget it.
> Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to
a GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at
last.
Actually, that is surprising for me as well. NVIDIA's Tegra
should easily be powerful enough to run the OS for training or
inference workload. If I were to guess, NVIDIA wants to avoid
getting caught too hard on the "selling AI shovels" train.
philistine wrote 28 min ago:
Apple did not want their x86 chips, they wanted their Xscale
stuff. Apple went to Intel to get chips, the power envelope was
appealing to Apple. Intel was the one to say no.
jfdi wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
Great news for all involved. It also would seem to validate Appleâs
unified architecture for inference, and imply AMD is getting closeâ¦
kllrnohj wrote 2 hours 20 min ago:
You mean AMD's unified architecture. They were a founder of the HSA
Foundation that drove innovation in this space complete with Linux
kernel investments and unified compute SDKs, and they had the first
shipping hardware support.
xbar wrote 1 hour 11 min ago:
This is a strong take.
AMD's actual commitment to open innovation over the past ~20 years
has been game changing in a lot of segments. It is the aspect of
AMD that makes it so much more appealing than intel from a
hacker/consumer perspective.
bobajeff wrote 3 hours 3 min ago:
What's the significance of $5B of stock? Does that mean controlling
share in Intel?
mr_toad wrote 2 hours 32 min ago:
Itâs a corporate engagement ring.
zeograd wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
Article mentions it amounts to ~5% ownership
Ozarkian wrote 2 hours 48 min ago:
It's written in the article that the $5B represents about 5% of Intel
stock outstanding.
kypro wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
No, but it's still a big stake from the largest player in semis. You
wouldn't expect a move like that if they didn't see an opportunity
there.
onlyrealcuzzo wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
Seems like when Microsoft invested in Apple to keep Apple from
going out of business and turning Microsoft into a potential
Monopoly.
iamacyborg wrote 3 hours 0 min ago:
I would assume not given their market cap.
sho_hn wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
nVidia has also been licensing their GPU IP to MediaTek recently, who
are working on a 2nd generation of a SoC that combines their ARM cores
with nVidia GPUs now, catering to e.g. the automotive market.
Looks like using GPU IP to take over other brands' product lines is now
officially an nVidia strategy.
I guess the obvious worry here is whether Intel will continue
development of their own dGPUs, which have a lovely open driver stack.
KeplerBoy wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
Seems Nvidia needs an alternative to MediaTek or wants to pressure
MediaTek given the announcement of x86 Intel/Nvidia SoCs and the
delay of DGX Spark, GB10 and N1X.
They wanted to launch DGX Spark early summer and it's nowhere to be
seen, while strix halo is shipping in over 30+ SKUs from all major
manufacturers.
Panzer04 wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
Unless Nvidia outright absorbs intel I think Intel would have to be
kind of crazy to stop developing GPUs.
So long as the AI craze is hanging in there it feels like having that
expertise and IP is going to have high potential upside.
sho_hn wrote 2 hours 55 min ago:
I'd agree, but Intel has also halted dGPU development efforts
before, cf. the canned Larrabee project. Which was more troubled on
the technology side however.
ACCount37 wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
Yeah, Larrabee was nowhere near what they have now with Intel
Arc.
Would be foolish to throw that away now that they're finally
getting closer to "a product someone may want to buy" with things
like B50 and B60.
gorgoiler wrote 3 hours 5 min ago:
> It is unclear if Intel will issue new stock for Nvidia to purchase
Erm, a rather important point to bury down the story. The fiest
question on anyoneâs lips will be is this $5bn to build new chip
technology, or $5bn for employees to spend on yachts?
Mistletoe wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
Itâs the most important part of the story. Itâs so gross that
companies can just dilute and create stock out of thin air like this.
Why hold stock in Intel if the only people that ever buy the real
stock and create buy pressure are the plebs? Here is the previous
timeâ¦
> Intel stock experienced dilution because the U.S. government
converted CHIPS Act grants into an equity stake, acquiring a
significant ownership percentage at a discounted price, which
increased the total number of outstanding shares and reduced existing
shareholders' ownership percentage, according to The Motley Fool and
Investing.com. This led to roughly 11% dilution for existing
shareholders
andsoitis wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
> Itâs so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock
out of thin air like this.
To get money from the outside, you either have to take on debt or
you have to give someone a share in the business. In this case, the
board of directors concluded the latter is better. I don't
understand why you think it is gross.
geertj wrote 2 hours 29 min ago:
> Itâs so gross that companies can just dilute and create stock
out of thin air like this.
Intel is up 30% pre market on this news so I think the existing
shareholders will be fine.
joz1-k wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
About 16 years ago, Intel was considered an ugly monopoly that Nvidia
didn't like [0]. It seems as if they have switched sides now.
[0]: < [1] >
URI [1]: https://www.fudzilla.com/6882-nvidia-continues-comic-campaign-...
DrStartup wrote 3 hours 0 min ago:
they need domestic chip capabilities
ur-whale wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
5B is a fairly tiny stake (Intel's market cap is around 120B), other
than the "we're now working together" signal, why is this news?
glimshe wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
This is a technology forum first and foremost. I know it might not
look that way given the recent flood of political activism articles.
But, in the technology field, this is pretty big news. This stake
makes Nvidia one of Intel's biggest shareholders.
esseph wrote 1 hour 8 min ago:
There is a good chance this was required by politicians, and is
therefore political activism.
:-)
Ekaros wrote 2 hours 14 min ago:
Isn't 5% somewhat significant chunk? I really wouldn't call it tiny
one. Maybe not even small anymore.
9cb14c1ec0 wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
It's a good deal for Nvidia, because custom x86 server CPUs have
optimization potential for AI computing clusters, which matters now
that Nvidia has competitors that they didn't just 2 years ago. I
think that the next several years of Nvidia will be ones of fending
off growing competition.
They basically baked in a massive investment profit into the deal.
When you factor in the stock jump since this announcement, Nvidia has
already made billions.
ForHackernews wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
Who are NVidia's competitors? I thought they were the only game in
town when it came to CUDA/AI chips.
re-thc wrote 2 hours 35 min ago:
AMD, Broadcom, Huawei, etc
iamacyborg wrote 2 hours 59 min ago:
Market cap was closer to 90B before this deal was announced
Panzer04 wrote 3 hours 3 min ago:
tbf, If I were Nvidia and antitrust wasn't an issue I'd be tempted to
buy the whole thing.
Intel has a market cap just 2.5% of NVDA, so you could give away just
2.5% of your stock to buy the entirety of Intel. It's bonkers.
euLh7SM5HDFY wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
If that happened I would expect the same success story as with
Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger.
xbar wrote 1 hour 7 min ago:
Why? That is an example of a bad engineering company being
acquired and then poisoning the quality of the acquirer with its
toxic, low-quality, corporate-politics-above-engineering culture.
There have been a lot of mergers where that has not happened.
amalcon wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
There are two scenarios here. In one, the AI bubble bursts (so
Nvidia is overpriced now) and almost any value stock deal is good
for them. In the other, it doesn't, and this gives them a limited
hedge against problems with their most critical strategic partner
(TSMC).
It looks like a good deal either way and in any amount. But of
course I am no expert.
Panzer04 wrote 1 hour 15 min ago:
I suppose the problem is Intel doesn't actually have the fab
capacity anyway. They were building it, but that's all on ice
now, and probably wasn't close to TSMC anyway, I'd guess.
This all ignores the near complete lack of product out of their
advanced processes as well.
nabla9 wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
In terms of voting stock, they become the biggest owner after US
Commerce Department.
As customer they get better access to Intel Foundry and can offload
some capacity from TSMC.
voxadam wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
> In terms of voting stock, they become the biggest owner after US
Commerce Department.
As I understand it the government's shares are non-voting.
snake42 wrote 1 hour 34 min ago:
The U.S. government wonât have a seat on the board and agreed
to vote with Intelâs board on matters requiring shareholder
approval âwith limited exceptions.â
pjmlp wrote 3 hours 20 min ago:
So AMD got ATI, and now NVidia gets Intel.
gpderetta wrote 5 min ago:
Fitting. Then you used to bolt a GPU to a computer. These days you
bolt a computer to a GPU.
DiskoHexyl wrote 3 hours 15 min ago:
Difference is, AMD wasn't a competitor for ATi. One mostly built
CPU's, while another- GPUs.
These two, on the other hand, are competing in several major product
categories. Overall, not a good look
roboror wrote 40 min ago:
>One mostly built CPU's, while another- GPUs.
I mean that also applies to Intel and Nvidia. Intel does make GPUs
but their market impact is basically zero.
pjmlp wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
I doubt we would be seeing Dell selling NVidia ARM CPUs anytime
soon.
However I do imagine Intel GPUs, that were never great to start
with, might be doomed, long term.
Also another possibility would be, there goes One API, which I
doubt many people would care about, given how many rebrands SYSCL
already went through.
amo1111 wrote 3 hours 32 min ago:
This has been an interesting 1.5 months for Intel on all fronts. I
wonder how long this deal was in the making, since the timing is
impeccable, looking at the current administration's involvement with
Intel.
beameup10 wrote 3 hours 33 min ago:
Wasn't Nvidia working on their own CPU design? Will they drop that?
JonChesterfield wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
They're shipping arm derived cpus and have been for years.
vFunct wrote 21 min ago:
They also use RISC-V cores throughout their products
monkeydust wrote 3 hours 40 min ago:
Precursor to full acquisition perhaps...also maybe Jensen play to Trump
a bit in this.
Panzer04 wrote 3 hours 0 min ago:
If you wanted to acquire Intel you'd do it now. Maybe Intel's future
products are garbage and they do worse - but the upside seems pretty
high otherwise. This seems like a bit of a firesale price to acquire
an advanced fab and CPU maker. Sure, it's Intel and they haven't been
doing great, but companies with solid reliable outlooks don't trade
this cheaply.
Ofc I would kind of hope/expect antitrust to object given that Intel
makes both GPUs and CPUs, and Nvidia is/has dipped their toes into
CPU production as well.
fidotron wrote 2 hours 47 min ago:
> If you wanted to acquire Intel you'd do it now.
Intel still has to go through a lot of reorg (i.e. massive cuts) to
get to a happy place, and this is what their succession of CEOs
have been procrastinating over.
Panzer04 wrote 1 hour 14 min ago:
I recall reading a reddit comment (resounding source, I know)
that claimed the reason Intel's e-cores are crushing it is
because they actually synthesise them, while the P-cores are a
bunch of bespoke circuits bodged together.
One wonders just how bad things must have been internally for
that to be the state of one of their core IPs in this day and
age...
baq wrote 2 hours 28 min ago:
Judging by my linkedin feed the 'a lot of reorg' is underway.
fidotron wrote 2 hours 4 min ago:
Bluntly, Intel has corporate cancer, and it requires removing
the actual cancers, not a sort of 20% haircut.
hvb2 wrote 3 hours 5 min ago:
It would be 100% Trump to have Nvidia buy Intel and then announce how
good of an investment decision he made by buying a slice of intel.
USA, where the federal government is picking winners and losers by
making risky stock bets with public money.
delfinom wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
Not even the government at this point. The oligarchs are now in
full control of the US and are dividing up their kingdoms. The
plans for glulags for detractors are also being placed.
selimthegrim wrote 17 min ago:
[1] - one of the comments in the linked NYT article suggests we
all read Eugenia Ginsburgâs GULAG story as preparation.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45289785
geertj wrote 2 hours 23 min ago:
> The plans for glulags for detractors are also being placed.
This needlessly divisive and devoid of any factual basis. No
gulags will exist and you know it.
mschuster91 wrote 1 hour 28 min ago:
> This needlessly divisive and devoid of any factual basis. No
gulags will exist and you know it.
What about "Alligator Alcatraz", that has been called
"concentration camp" [1] (so comparable with a gulag), or where
the Korean detainees from the raid on the Hyundai/LG plant
ended up, alleging utterly horrible conditions [2]? And there's
bound to be more places like the latter, that was most likely
just the tip of the iceberg and we only know about the
conditions there because the South Korean government raised a
huge stink and got the workers out of there.
Okay, Alcatraz 2.0 did get suspended in August to my knowledge,
but that's only temporary. It's bound to get the legal issues
cleaned up and then be re-opened - or the case makes its way
through to the Supreme Court with the same result to be
expected. [1]
URI [1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/197508/alligator-alcat...
URI [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c07v1j98ydvo
PKop wrote 56 min ago:
Those people aren't American citizens, the comparison doesn't
fit.
amo1111 wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
If thereâs a time to do it, now would be the time with the current
administration looking at all the regulatory blowback.
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