NVIDIA Inside
Yang Jie
One of the more interesting things about NVIDIA being the most valuable company in the world for the past couple of years is that unlike their Big Tech peers, they're not really a known consumer brand. Sure, they have their graphics cards which have long been popular with gamers (and, of course, got them to their AI moment in the sun), but they're not the household name like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or Meta. And that's in part because those who buy from NVIDIA (again, aside from hardcore gamers), are largely the aforementioned Big Tech players (well, aside from Apple).
NVIDIA, it seems, would like to change that...
Nvidia chips for laptop computers are set to hit the market this year in products from Dell, Lenovo and others, a return to the consumer PC market for the leader in artificial-intelligence chips.
The world’s most valuable company by market capitalization, Nvidia isn’t expecting big profit soon from getting its chips into everyday PCs, but analysts said it wanted to keep a connection with consumers in an era when every device will be AI-enabled.
It's sort of buried in here, but this isn't just about GPUs, but CPUs as well. And it's a "return" to that market – beyond their mini AI "supercomputers" – in that the company actually made such chips for Microsoft's original version of the Surface products – which, um, didn't go so well. But they also make the chips powering the Nintendo Switch – both the original and new Switch 2 – which has done extremely well, obviously.
Still, NVIDIA is known as the GPU company, not the CPU company. That, despite all their problems over the past many years, would still be Intel. Thanks to their long-gone but still iconic "Intel Inside" marketing campaigns, consumers know Intel. Which is exactly why, nearly two years ago, I wrote a post entitled: Can NVIDIA Become Intel Faster Than Everyone Becomes NVIDIA?. In it, I noted:
At the same time, NVIDIA is moving further into tangential fields with not only different types of GPUs, but also CPUs as well. At first, it seems the aim is to try to take on more of the datacenter workloads, which their rivals Intel and AMD have long controlled. But presumably, this portends a move to try to take on all computing chip needs in general.
All of that is to say, NVIDIA is trying to become Intel faster than Intel (and everyone else) can become NVIDIA.
Well, the race to become NVIDIA is still very much on – for pretty much everyone aside from perhaps Intel. And yes, here NVIDIA comes for "general" computing as well. And they're doing this, in part, with Intel – back to Jie:
For the PC chip, Nvidia has two collaborations: one with Intel, which was announced last year, and a second with Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek, which was informally disclosed by Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang during a trip to Taiwan in January.
Nvidia’s new PC processors are designed to be what’s known as a system-on-a-chip. They integrate a central processor with the powerful graphics processing units for which the company is famous. GPUs are the chips that power AI models.
The Intel partnership would pair Intel CPUs with NVIDIA GPUs in one SoC. But the MediaTek one is arguably more interesting as it would be actual NVIDIA CPUs made in partnership with MediaTek working off of ARM designs – a company which, of course, NVIDIA was blocked from acquiring years ago.
It's that full NVIDIA SoC that Dell, Lenovo, and others seem to be circling. Undoubtedly in part to play up the NVIDIA angle, hoping to get some halo effect for PC sales. You could see the angle being something like "forget about Intel and AMD, NVIDIA, the company building the future of AI, is here with PC chips". Yes, they'd be touting "NVIDIA Inside".
Fewer consumers are paying attention to PCs these days in a tech world dominated by talk of AI and smartphones, but laptops are still a big business. Nvidia’s Huang has observed that roughly 150 million laptops are sold each year, explaining why the area is worth his attention.
“There’s an entire segment of the market where the CPU and GPU are integrated,” he said last September. “That segment has been largely unaddressed by Nvidia today.”
One imagines a company absolutely printing money at the moment – so much so that they can't find things to spend it on – can help with any marketing push too...
But while the obvious early sweet spot would be gamers, who again know the brand thanks to their GPUs, it's a bit of a complicated one:
For the Nvidia-MediaTek collaboration, the challenge will be making the PCs compatible with high-end games and other applications originally designed for the Intel standard.
The Arm architecture used by the Nvidia-MediaTek team has proved troublesome for gamers. In 2024, Microsoft rolled out new AI PCs with chips from Qualcomm using designs from Arm. Many gamers complained they couldn’t play their favorite games on those PCs.
But one has to imagine that NVIDIA can figure this out, even if Microsoft and Qualcomm couldn't – as they were clearly too focused on, what else: AI. (And, of course, Apple's MacBook Air.) Could such machines lead to an actual "supercycle" for the PC? Or is it just a smart play by NVIDIA to make some inroads into the hearts and minds of actual consumers as AI permeates everything?...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler