Don’t Get Too Excited for That Nvidia and Intel Chip Just Yet

What’s the point of competition anymore? Nvidia may still be trying to make its own CPUs. Intel could have beefed up its Arc GPUs around the corner. But now the two U.S.-based chipmakers plan to make SoCs, or system-on-chips, combining each company’s specialty. While we’re all curious about what this means for the future of PCs, you’ll need to wait a good long while to see what form the new chips from the new Wonder Twins will take.

Nvidia is effectively netting a $5 billion stake in Intel, a deal that acts as another shot of adrenaline for the beleaguered chipmaker. The investment is like a one-two punch following President Donald Trump’s efforts to bend the company to his will with the U.S. government’s $11 billion investment. During a Q&A press conference held on Thursday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stressed, “The Trump Administration had no involvement in the partnership at all.†The partnership supplies Intel’s x86 microarchitecture for the purpose of building more energy- and water-dependent data center infrastructure. For the rest of us who actually use Intel and Nvidia’s products on a daily basis, the pair promise to craft new SoCs using Intel’s CPU know-how and Nvidia’s graphics capabilities.

The first thing we have to acknowledge is that anything that comes out of this partnership will take time to develop. In a statement, an Intel spokesperson told me that the company doesn’t have any real product timelines to share. Either way, this will be a multi-generational platform that “will take some time†to develop. Industry analyst Patrick Moorhead told PCWorld he doesn’t expect these new SoCs to rear their heads for at least two to three years.

These chimera-esque chips will take time

It’s not as if Intel and Nvidia haven’t been dancing partners on previous occasions, but this new marriage will have both companies learning all new moves—perhaps they’ll need to take a salsa class. Nvidia was once much bigger on integrated GPUs, but after years of losing out on access to MacBooks, it strayed away from doing any kind of PC that didn’t have something to do with graphics. The latest rumors have suggested Nvidia was working on an ARM-based CPU for PC, though those plans may be delayed to 2026. We doubt the new partnership will change that. Huang stressed the company was “fully committed to the ARM roadmap.â€

Excited to team up with my good friend Jensen to jointly develop multiple generations of custom data center and PC products!

Our collaboration brings together the best of @Intel and @nvidia to benefit customers – and shows how vital x86 architecture and NVLink will be in… pic.twitter.com/lnEtmJW73A

— Lip-Bu Tan (@LipBuTan1) September 18, 2025

There’s a reason everybody’s twisted in knots over the news. We’re all interested in the graphics potential of a notebook packed with all-in-one graphics and processing potential. If they can manage power and performance, perhaps we won’t have to rely nearly as much on expensive gaming laptops with discrete GPUs that cost more and limit battery life. These chips will still use the x86 microarchitecture. Intel and its main competition, AMD, license x86 architecture for 64-bit designs through several cross-license agreements.

Nvidia crafted the ARM-based chip used for the Nintendo Switch 2. Meanwhile, AMD has made inroads in gaming thanks to its partnership with both Sony and Xbox on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X. The next generation of the company’s APUs, or accelerated processing units that combine CPU and GPU capabilities, will supposedly power the PlayStation 6 and rumored PlayStation handheld. Huang told reporters and investors, “There’s an entire segment of the market where the CPU and GPU are integrated, and it’s for form factor reasons, or cost reasons, or battery life reasons, all kinds of reasons, and that segment has been largely unaddressed by Nvidia today.â€

Intel and Nvidia’s new buddy-buddy attitude may offer more competition for AMD, though it could take a different form than AMD’s all-in-one approach. We won’t know yet what variety of chimera chip this will eventually look like. In the Q&A, Huang said he hopes the partnership will “address a vast majority of the PC consumer notebook market.†The Nvidia CEO is known to edge toward exaggeration or outright hyperbole. Remember his statements about the RTX 5070 having RTX 4090 performance? But as a statement of intent, it doesn’t seem like these chips are aimed at specialty devices.

The rumor mill has suggested Nvidia could launch “Super†variants of its top-end graphics cards early next year at CES 2026 that might offer better performance over the RTX 40-series. In the near future, we should expect Intel to launch its Panther Lake mobile chips and other offerings that we expect will target gamers. The near future seems more set in stone. But what about the long term?

Let’s hope we don’t lose out on GPU options

Intel depends on its consumer-ready chips far more than Nvidia needs its gaming-specific revenue to survive. The news from Thursday had many concerned that both Nvidia and Intel could drastically modify their plans for CPUs and GPUs. Intel has long been busy crafting its GPU arm through its Arc branding. The company’s last big milestone was its Battlemage budget graphics cards, which are still relatively strong for their price—especially for 1080p and occasionally 1440p gaming. There’s also the hope that Intel’s Xe3 cores for its CPUs will offer better gaming performance than Xe2 on its current swathe of chips.

“We’re not discussing specific roadmaps at this time, but the collaboration is complementary to Intel’s roadmap, and Intel will continue to have GPU product offerings,†Intel told me in an email statement.

With this investment, PC diehards keep harping on the idea that Intel will drop its Arc GPU offering, but Nvidia is in an odd spot with the silicon most people use day to day. It’s making the lion’s share of its money selling big AI chips to cloud giants. Its much-hyped GeForce RTX 50-series graphics card lineup was hampered by small performance gains over the last generation of GPUs, plus limited supply and tariff woes that pushed prices beyond what many folk could afford. Nvidia has enough money to do what it wants, but what if it decides desktop GPUs aren’t nearly as interesting as these smaller mobile chips? An Nvidia spokesperson told me it had no statement regarding future project roadmaps.

We need competition. AMD and its latest graphics card options offer better value on the whole compared to Nvidia, at least when you can buy one at the stated price. AMD has been pushing GPU capabilities on its chips much harder and for longer than Intel. Benchmarks show the latest Strix Halo chips are beefy for gaming scenarios. We don’t want Intel or Nvidia to stop trying new things. This partnership could push our PCs beyond what we have now, or it could lead companies to abandon ship while chasing easy money.