Speculation: Intel Will Buy nVIDIA

http://www.cringely.com/2009/12/intel-will-buy-nvidia/

by profquail • 17 years ago

42 34 17 years ago

three14• 17 years ago

If I'm not behind the times, wouldn't there be antitrust problems from the huge percentage of the chipset market that would be held by the combined company?

shizcakes• 17 years ago

AMD / ATI?

Psyonic• 17 years ago

Yes, but that was smaller/smaller. This is bigger/bigger, so it's not necessarily proof that it would be allowed.

petercooper• 17 years ago

Looking at the respective balance sheets of both companies, it's certainly possible. I was thinking it might not be.. but was surprised to see Intel has a 110bn market cap versus nVidia's 8..

kiujhygfvgbn3• 17 years ago

One of the most reliable rules on the internet is that Cringley is always wrong.

rfreytag2• 17 years ago

Cringely called the HP-Compaq acquisition perfectly.

He gets out there a ways but is not as wrong as often as he is really right in my experience.

riffic• 17 years ago

You're confusing Cringely with John C. Dvorak.

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

Maybe we'll start getting some decent open source graphics drivers.

tewks• 17 years ago

Writing drivers is one of the most difficult aspects of producing graphics cards; perhaps you are right if competition in the space decreases.

protomyth• 17 years ago

well, if this article http://www.brightsideofnews.com/print/2009/10/12/an-inconven... is true, then the answer is no.

from the article: The problem is that Intel hired a 3rd party vendor called Tungsten Graphics [now a whole owned subsidiary of VMware Inc.] to create the drivers for the parts. Problem with those drivers is the fact that "GMA500 suffers from utterly crappy drivers. Intel didn't buy any drivers from Imagination Technologies for the SGX, but hired Tungsten Graphics to write the drivers for it. Despite the repeated protest from the side of Imagination Technologies to Intel, Tungsten drivers DO NOT use the onboard firmware of the chip, forcing the chip to resort to software vertex processing."

fungi• 17 years ago

While i share your sentiment, NVIDIA's binary blobs are pretty good.

I wont be buying any ATI product until their drivers improve substantially and Intels GPU's don't really cut it for anything beyond basic desktop effects.

lyime• 17 years ago

Intel will not buy Nvidia. More like Intel can't. The deal would never go through all the checks. Intel doesnt need Nvidia and Nvidia cannot make a CPU part. At-least not an x86 CPU part (licensing).

gvb2• 17 years ago

Setting aside the antitrust issues...

Intel needs nVidia because it (arguably) cannot make a GPU part (the ones it has are slow, Larrabee is a bust). nVidia is (arguably) less dependent on Intel since it has standalone GPUs as well as low power integrated ARM+GPUs. This makes nVidia well positioned in the low power mobile world, a place where Intel just started to aspire to.

In "An Inconvenient Truth: Intel Larrabee story revealed" http://www.brightsideofnews.com/print/2009/10/12/an-inconven... (discussed on HN yesterday http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980927), skip down to the section "GPU is dead" and the war with nVidia. In it, the author asserts Intel started a war with nVidia before it had real ammunition (Larrabee) and is in a world of hurt as a result. His speculation is "...on Intel giving an x86 license to nVidia in exchange for cross-license patent, but only time will tell how the situation will develop."

If true, that would give nVidia a x86 CPU in addition to their ARM CPU and graphics GPU. Pretty interesting thought.

joshu• 17 years ago

Didn't Intel sell the ARM division to Marvell or something?

Keyframe• 17 years ago

hm, intel tries hard to make a decent GPU for years now and fails miserably every time. AMD bought ATI, why intel shouldn't pass checks to buy nvidia then? Nvidia seems a bit lost in their direction and they are using TSMC's fabs, where they could use intels if there were an acquisition. Both companies have superb engineering talent. Also, there was always this feud between AMD/ATi vs intel/NVIDIA rigs amongst geeks, might be a consolidation on that turf also.

I like that idea.

prabodh2• 17 years ago

pardon my ignorance..Is it trust worthy Source ??

sp332• 17 years ago

No, Cringely is generally untrustworthy.

eli2• 17 years ago

Cringely means well, but he tends to get these sorts of hunches that don't necessarily have any basis in reality.

From the article: "If this reads like a huge conspiracy theory that’s because it is."

tptacek• 17 years ago

WOW does this title need to be edited. I didn't bother reading it via my RSS feed, figuring, "uh, ok, Intel is buying nVidia". That's because the RSS feed doesn't include the "cringely.com".

adatta02• 17 years ago

would probably lead to some pretty crazy GPU/CPU rigs. especially if the CPUs were "aware" that workloads could be offloaded to the GPU.

dnsworks3• 17 years ago

Speculation: EU already planning to bully Intel out of acquiring nVIDIA

cloudkj• 17 years ago

Intel and NVIDIA generally operate under different philsophies. Intel, of course, adamantly backs the CPU. NVIDIA has for a while been touting the superiority of the GPU and the idea of general purpose GPUs, with projects like CUDA.

Not to mention, NVIDIA is still reeling from the costs of repairing faulty GPUs from last year, coupled with the impact of the recession on demand. They were also facing pricing pressures from AMD, especially at the consumer/enthusiast level. All of this led to fixed costs and cut into margins, which resulted in lower profits in the last several quarters. However, NVIDIA's management has remained resolute with a long-term focus. IMHO, NVIDIA is, at the moment, grossly undervalued. So that $110B vs $8B market cap is a bit misleading.

igorhvr• 17 years ago

NVidia is one of the few fairly big companies I know that is able to write extremely good documentation. That, alone, makes me root for them.

malkia• 17 years ago

Just one comment about the x86 instruction set: Right is wrong. I'm just amazed at the engineers at Intel who are getting out with this horrible instruction set (horrible, and the same time - the only assembly instruction set that I can read & write) :)

Speculation: Intel Will Buy nVIDIA

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