On Thursday, Intel and Nvidia announced a major partnership that shook up the chip market and a number of shares. But Apple – and Apple fans – shouldn’t start to fool out.
The deal is pretty simple. First, Nvidia will buy Intel Common Stock of $ 5 billion. It alone sent Intel’s stock soaring.
For the server market, Intel builds custom X86 CPUs that NVIDIA will use in its AI data center products. Nvidia is already managing the AI ​​-Datacenter business and if it can get a little more performance or efficiency with a custom CPU, it’s good, but it hardly means those who use Apple products.
A report last year said Apple is not using Nvidia’s products to train its AI models and prefer Google’s Tensor Cloud products instead. There have been major upheavals in Apple’s AI development since then, and it wouldn’t surprise us if Nvidia was a big part of Apple’s cloud-based AI training now, but whether Apple is using training server products from an external company is not a huge deal.
Apple is developing its own “private cloud computers” AI servers using Apple Silicon, but these appear to be aimed at inference -where the trained model runs on a user’s requests and data to generate a result for them. Apple can still rely on hardware outside AI training, which often has different and more effective requirements.
Mac vs pc
The more interesting part of the partnership is the development of new consumer chips. Intel will build and sell new X86 RTX System-On chips that combine an Intel CPU and NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets.
Intel already sells CPUs with integrated GPUs to the Thin-and-Light Notebook market, but the GPUs in these products fall far behind competing products from AMD and Apple. AMD’s superior performance in graphics (and in some cases also CPUs) has made it win a certain market share and has dominated the new handheld gaming computer market.
With this deal, Intel/Nvidia is likely to be able to sell much better products that are aimed at thin and lightweight laptops and handheld games -PCs -at the moment, larger games -portable computers and of course desktop -PCs are dominated by systems that use discreet NVIDIA GPUs, but it’s Power Hogs for comparison.
Where does that leave Apple? Will these chips be out of Apple’s impressive M-series chips? Should people switch from MacBooks to Windows -Arable computers?
We don’t know how chips will work. No actual products or any of their technical specifications are advertised. We don’t know when they will be released – will these first Intel/Nvidia SOCS compete with next year’s M5 series or M6? Maybe even M7?
We have heard allegations of superior performance to Apple’s chips before, and eventually the products that use these chips cannot keep up, especially without using much more power. Apple has some catching up to do on graphics performance, but CPU, video and audio coding as well as neural engine-IA treatment remains top-tier.
You can already get a faster laptop than a MacBook with equivalent price (especially in graphics performance). But that is it not A MacBook. It does not have the same build quality, battery life and attention to details.
But most importantly, people buy people macs because they Would you use a Mac. It’s macos and the apps running on it (Apple and others) along with easy operations with other Apple products that make people have a Mac. Maybe Intel’s new chips will restore the pentium-power PC weapons race in the mid-90s, but eventually, while this Intel/Nvidia partnership is interesting, it doesn’t matter to fundamentally change much.