Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
Chip giant and current king of the GPU hill, Nvidia, has announced a joint partnership with rival AMD to produce ARM CPUs aimed at the laptop and desktop market. This partnership is strange on a number of levels.
For starters, AMD is a direct competitor with Nvidia in the GPU marketplace, and while not having nearly the market saturation and cache Nvidia possesses, AMD has been making significant strides. Additionally, AMD has their own x86 based processor lines for the desktop and laptop market, which by all accounts rival or exceed Intel’s current batch of processors.
Why would AMD potentially cannibalize its own market and help out a competitor in the process? The answer would appear to be Microsoft’s current push to adopt ARM on the Windows platform. Currently, Qualcomm has exclusive rights to produce ARM-based devices for Microsoft, but that arrangement expires at the end of 2024. Given the ramp up time for a new CPU, that may align quite nicely with Nvidia and AMD’s market entrance of their ARM offering.
After news of the partnership was announced, Intel stock dropped by 3%. While we aren’t sure who the winners will be in this ARM race, I think we all know who’s losing their leg up on the competition. I’m so sorry. I’ll stop now.