Intel is now coming to NVIDIA’s GTC mega-event, not just a guest this time, but rather the company will play an important role in dictating the future of NVIDIA’s compute capabilities.
Intel’s Server CPU Constraints Are Going to Get a Lot More Aggressive, Following Their Collaboration With NVIDIA
For those unaware, this year’s GTC is expected to feature several major announcements that will influence NVIDIA and its supply chain partners, particularly Intel, which will also get the spotlight. NVIDIA and Intel entered into a $5 billion agreement a few months ago, in which both companies agreed to work together in the realm of CPUs, featuring x86 consumer and enterprise products. According to Intel’s recent announcement, GTC will give a rundown of how the partnership with NVIDIA will pan out, and it is expected that enterprise CPUs will be a special focus.
While Intel hasn’t specifically said what it will unveil at GTC, the broader idea is to help NVIDIA and its customers overcome the CPU bottleneck, which the rise of agentic workloads has recently exacerbated. Hyperscalers like Meta, alongside AI labs like OpenAI, have started to enter into “CPU-only” agreements with NVIDIA in recent times, which is an indicator that, at least in recent times, the importance of CPUs within rack infrastructure has grown tremendously, which is why the NVIDIA-Intel collaboration is more important than ever.
Image Credits: STH/NVIDIA
We anticipate Intel will unveil an arrangement in which Xeon CPUs will be part of NVIDIA’s AI racks, and we already know this is happening, given that Intel is part of NVIDIA’s “NVLink Fusion” ecosystem. The more interesting question here is which generation of Xeon processors will be part of this collaboration. If we go with the latest ones, the 6th-generation CPUs, coming under the Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids lineup, will be a part of NVIDIA’s AI racks, but for now, this isn’t certain.
NVIDIA and Intel are also working on a joint x86 laptop-focused SoC featuring RTX GPU chiplets, but we don’t expect it to be showcased at GTC, given that the event is more inclined toward enterprise launches. Since NVIDIA is also working on consumer-focused ARM laptop chips, such as the N1/N1X, the joint SoC with Intel would come after them, so it’s quite a few years away. NVIDIA’s GTC event commences on March 16, where we will see Jensen unveil everything around the future of the AI race.
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