On Thursday Intel and Nvidia announced a large partnership That shook the chip market and a number of shares. But Apple – and Apple fans – should not start too freaking.
The deal is fairly simple. Firstly, Nvidia will buy $ 5 billion in ordinary shares of Intel. That alone sent the stock of Intel.
For the server market, Intel will build adapted X86 CPUs that Nvidia will use in its AI data center products. NVIDIA already rules the AI Datacenter Business and if it can pronounce a little more performance or efficiency with an adapted CPU, that is good, but it is hardly important for those who use Apple products.
A report last year said that Apple did not use NVIDIA products to train its AI models, instead prefer the Google’s Tensor Cloud products. Since then there have been large revolutions in the AI development of Apple and it would not surprise us if Nvidia was a large part of the cloud-based AI training of Apple, but whether Apple used training server products from one external company or another is not a big deal.
Apple develops its own “private cloud compute compute” Servers using Apple Silicon, but they seem to be aimed at inferences – where the trained model is performed on requests and data from a user to generate a result for them. Apple can still rely on external hardware for AI training, which often has different and more power-intensive 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 chipets.
Intel already sells CPUs with integrated GPUs for the thin and light notebook market, but the GPUs in those products are far behind competing products from AMD and Apple. AMD’s superior performance in graphics (and in some cases also CPUs) has let it win a market share and has dominated the new handheld gaming computer market.
With this deal Intel/Nvidia will probably be able to sell much better products that are aimed at thin and light laptops and handheld gaming pcs -usually larger gaming laptops and of course desktop pcs are dominated by systems that use discreet nvidia GPUs, but they are Power Hogs by comparison.
Where does that Apple leave behind? Are these chips going to beat the impressive M-series chips from Apple? Are people switching from MacBooks to Windows laptops?
Well, we don’t know how the chips will perform. No real products have been announced, nor one of their technical specifications. We do not know when they will be released – will this first Intel/Nvidia Soc’s compete with next year’s M5 series, or M6? Maybe even M7?
We have previously heard claims of superior performance to Apple’s chips, and ultimately the products that those chips use cannot keep up with, especially without using much more strength. Apple has something to catch up on graphic performance, but the CPU, video and audio coding, as well as the AI processing of the neural engine, remains from top class.
You can already get a faster laptop than an equivalent MacBook (especially in graphic performance). But it’s not A MacBook. It does not have the same build quality, battery life and attention to detail.
But the most important thing is that people buy Macs because they Want to use a Mac. They are macOS and the apps that work on it (Apple’s and others), together with easy operability with other Apple products, so that people want a Mac. Perhaps the new chips from Intel will reinstall the PC-Weapon race in the mid-90s, but in the end, although this Intel/Nvidia partnership is interesting, it does nothing to change much fundamentally.
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