Nvidia bets $5 billion on building a "high - speed road" for CPUs and GPUs
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Author: Fan Liang
On September 18th, NVIDIA announced that it would invest $5 billion in Intel's common stock at a price of $23.28 per share. After the investment is completed, NVIDIA is expected to hold more than 4% of Intel's shares.
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Meanwhile, the two companies reached a cooperation. In the data center field, Intel will customize x86 processors for NVIDIA. In the personal computing field, Intel will launch x86 system - on - chips integrating NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets into the market.
Affected by this news, Intel's stock price rose 22.77% at the close, and NVIDIA's stock price rose 3.54%.
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NVIDIA emphasized on its official website that the two parties achieve seamless architectural interconnection through NVLink technology - integrating NVIDIA's advantages in the fields of AI and accelerated computing with Intel's advanced CPU technology and the x86 ecosystem to provide cutting - edge solutions for customers.
For a long time, PCIe has been the main bus standard connecting CPUs and GPUs. GPUs need to continuously transfer data from the system memory to themselves through PCIe and then send back the processing results. The bandwidth and latency of PCIe have become bottlenecks in high - performance computing.
In 2021, NVIDIA publicly announced its ARM - based Grace CPU for the first time and deeply integrated the NVLink interconnection technology, achieving a direct connection with ultra - high bandwidth and ultra - low latency between the CPU and GPU.
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In the future, by enabling Intel's x86 CPUs to support NVLink, NVIDIA will expand the application scope of NVLink from its own relatively closed Grace/DGX ecosystem to the larger and more open x86 server and PC ecosystem. This will enable more enterprises and developers to take advantage of the high - speed interconnection of NVLink, further consolidating NVIDIA's leading position in the field of accelerated computing.