After purchasing ATI, AMD became the primary competition for both Intel and NVIDIA, and honestly the relatively small company has held its own against these juggernauts admirably by carving out niches that neither of them can seem to challenge.
Now, however, AMD’s business rivals are teaming up, and that might spell the end for AMD’s underdog story in the long term.
Intel and NVIDIA Surprised Everyone With a Huge Partnership
In what my colleague Jorge Aguilar called a “historic collaboration”, Intel and NVIDIA announced a massive partnership. One part of it is NVIDIA putting a cool $5bn into Intel stock, but the real story here is that the two companies will produce x86 hardware together.
While NVIDIA is still working on Arm-based chips featuring its graphics technology, it doesn’t have an x86 license, which is notoriously hard to get. Intel, for its part, is still far behind NVIDIA in terms of GPU technology. So this is a partnership that can benefit both companies.
While this collaboration will yield data center hardware, and products aimed at professionals and business customers, there will be consumer products that contain Intel CPU cores, and NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets.
AMD’s APUs Have Been a Unique Strength
That should worry AMD, because a huge part of its business comes in the form of so-called “APUs”. While AMD’s CPU and GPUs have been technically inferior compared Intel and NVIDIA respectively, in the form of an APU, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Consequently, AMD APUs are inside every modern Xbox, every modern PlayStation, virtually every handheld PC, inside gaming tablets, and high-performance ultraportable laptops.
Neither Intel nor NVIDIA have something that can compete directly with AMD APUs. Intel’s had some luck with its latest APU equivalent chips using its Arc GPU architecture, seen in PC handhelds like the MSI Claw. However, Intel’s software and compatibility with the larger PC game library have been sticking points.
Intel/NVIDIA SOCs Could Destroy That Advantage Overnight
An APU-like chip from a collaboration like this could wipe out AMD’s unique advantage in the blink of an eye. While it won’t necessarily wipe AMD off the map or anything, it would introduce competition in markets where AMD has faced none so far.
Of course, that could be great for us. After all, products like handheld PCs have absurd prices now and any pressure to compete could help with that.
It Will Be Years Before the Partnership Bears Fruit
The good news for AMD is that, unless Intel and NVIDIA have been working together in secret, it will likely be years before any actual products appear on the market.
Designing an SoC or the chips that go inside one takes years. When two companies have to work together like this for the first time, that slows things down even more. There’s a clash of culture, differences in how their respective engineers do things, and there will be points of conflict.
Which means that AMD has time to do something about it. What that “something” could be is anyone’s guess, but like the Titanic, AMD can see the iceberg coming. The question is whether it’s already too late to steer around it.
AMD Needs to Innovate Fast
AMD has often competed by offering most of the performance of its competitors at a better price, or by offering value for money, or by eschewing the high-end and concentrating on the mid-range, where most components are sold anyway.
On the CPU side, it’s actually been giving Intel a good thrashing for years now, though that’s as much about what Intel’s done wrong than it is about what AMD’s done right. But that’s in the relatively niche and small desktop PC market with discrete CPUs. This partnership could hurt AMD’s prospects in mass-market products like laptops, and in the long term it could even wrest the lucrative console market away from it.
While AMD’s been a CPU technology leader for as long as I can remember, it’s almost always been a technological follower when it comes to NVIDIA and GPUs. AMD’s been on the back foot with ray-tracing, AI upscaling, AI processing, and numerous continuous boundary-pushing features and iterations NVIDIA brings to the table.
It seems that AMD is simply trying to catch up and copy with whatever new feature NVIDIA announces, bringing out its own inferior versions a few months later. That won’t do in the face of this partnership, and AMD needs to think up its own original technologies and features that set it apart from NVIDIA (without forgetting about the sleeping giant that is Intel) and the clock is ticking.
- Brand
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Sapphire
- Cooling Method
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Air
- GPU Speed
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2520Mhz
- Interface
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PCIe
- Memory
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16GB DDR6
- Boost Speed
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3060Mhz