Making Peace with the Enemy - Nvidia in Talks to Use Intel as a Foundry to Manufacture Chips + Intel and AMD knew Nvidia's secret roadmap

[Lightwreather]

Summary

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang held a question and answer session with the press today, and the topic quickly turned to Intel's Foundry Services (IFS) initiative that will see Intel making chips for other companies as part of its IDM 2.0 initiative. Surprisingly, Huang confirmed that his company is considering using Intel's foundry to possibly make some of its chips.

Intel is now a direct competitor with Nvidia on both the CPU and GPU fronts, but Huang also explained that Intel and AMD have known Nvidia's secret roadmaps for years so he isn't paranoid about sharing more information.

 

Quotes

Quote

"Our strategy is to expand our supply base with diversity and redundancy at every single layer. At the chip layer, at the substrate layer, the system layer, at every single layer. We've diversified the number of nodes, we've diversified the number of foundries, and Intel is an excellent partner of ours[…]. They're interested in us using their foundries, and we're very interested in exploring it," said Huang.

Huang did hedge somewhat, explaining that operating as a foundry is very different from operating as a standard product-oriented company like Intel. "Being a foundry at the caliber of TSMC is not for the faint of heart; this is a change not just in process technology and investment of capital, but it is a change in culture, from a product-oriented company to a product, technology, and service-oriented company," Huang explained.

"I am encouraged by the work that is done at Intel, I think this is a direction they have to go, and we're interested in looking at their process technology. Our relationship with Intel is quite long; we work with them across a whole lot of different areas, every single PC, every single laptop, every single PC, supercomputer, we collaborate." Huang said.

Intel now makes GPUs, and Nvidia now makes GPUs, meaning the two companies will now compete directly in several market segments. Huang was also asked about any concerns with sharing Nvidia's secrets with Intel, and his response was quite revealing:

"We have been working closely with Intel, sharing with them our roadmap long before we share it with the public, for years. Intel has known our secrets for years. AMD has known our secrets for years. We are sophisticated and mature enough to realize that we have to collaborate.[...] We share roadmaps, of course, under confidentiality and a very selective channel of communications. The industry has just learned how to work in that way."

 

 

My thoughts

Well, that was admittedly two revealing statements. One is that Nvidia is considering working with Intel's Foundry services which makes it seem that Intel's plan for IDM 2.0 might actually be working? That's rather interesting. It was also stated that Intel and AMD knew at least small bits and pieces of what Nvidia has been (and will) working on. That's sort of "what?" moment (for me at least, I was expecting corporate espionage to be the way to get such info). Now, whether will indeed make use of Intel's fabs and what they will utilise them for, we'll have to wait and see.

 

Sources

Tom's Hardware

[SupaKomputa]

Since when Nvidia had a beef with Intel? I thought they never cross path.

[Lightwreather]

1 minute ago, SupaKomputa said:

Since when Nvidia had a beef with Intel? I thought they never cross path.

Well, that part was clickbait. I thought it'd be a fun title. But it could be appropos since Intel is going to be competeing directly with them in a couple days (<7 days).

[igormp]

13 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

One is that Nvidia is considering working with Intel's Foundry services which makes it seem that Intel's plan for IDM 2.0 might actually be working? That's rather interesting.

I guess that's not really surprising. Nvidia has switched fabs more than once, they just go with the cheaper one that can meet their demands. Heck, even in the current gen they had their top A100 built by tsmc and the remaining of the lineup on Samsung because TSMC didn't want to give them a discount.

 

15 minutes ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

It was also stated that Intel and AMD knew at least small bits and pieces of what Nvidia has been (and will) working on. That's sort of "what?" moment

Again, not really surprising since Nvida has built clusters and supercomputers in partnership with both Intel and AMD.

Their last DGX used AMD CPUs since they had PCIe 4.0 ready, and the upcoming DGX will likely use Intel since they were ahead with PCIe 5.0.

That's not to mention the partnership required to deploy laptops and other devices where they need to rely on intel or amd for the CPU.

[SupaKomputa]

1 minute ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Well, that part was clickbait. I thought it'd be a fun title. But it could be appropos since Intel is going to be competeing directly with them in a couple days (<7 days).

btw i just found out that Nvidia is using AMD CPU for their servers. all's fair in love and war.

[williamcll]

Arm, and and Intel? What's next? A pre built nvidia with a 256 core RISC-V? 

[igormp]

28 minutes ago, williamcll said:

Arm, and and Intel? What's next? A pre built nvidia with a 256 core RISC-V? 

Nvidia already uses RISC-V for their Falcon mcu (found inside most of their GPUs), and also had partnerships with IBM in order to have a POWER-based setup with nvlink built into the CPU.

 

They will partnership with anyone as long as they can get some profit lol

[AlTech]

Tell me Intel, Nvidia, and AMD are acting against anti-trust laws without telling me Intel, Nvidia, and AMD are acting against anti-trist laws

[igormp]

https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1507338834291433472

[porina]

It's a horrible word, but coopetition is a thing. Companies cover so many areas now you can work with them in some areas while at the same time compete with them in others.

 

6 hours ago, igormp said:

https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1507338834291433472

I'd even go as far as to say it could be negligent if a company were not to follow up on opportunities that can advance their business.

 

Also keep in mind any discussion today might not hit products for some years out. Maybe a bit earlier depending on when those talks started. Intel may be behind TSMC at this moment, but they're expecting to be leading TSMC 2025, so maybe in products from 2026. Of course it is not a certainty that Intel will be able to achieve that at all, in that timescale, but same could be said for TSMC's plans. TSMC may have a better recent history, but I'd take the general advice that past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future performance.

[Kelsey]

On 3/23/2022 at 2:49 PM, igormp said:

I guess that's not really surprising. Nvidia has switched fabs more than once, they just go with the cheaper one that can meet their demands. Heck, even in the current gen they had their top A100 built by tsmc and the remaining of the lineup on Samsung because TSMC didn't want to give them a discount.

 

 

Discounts are virtually non existent in today's fabs. TSMC is still supplying over 80% of the Nvidia portofolio. Globalfoundries may be a big player in a couple of with their next fab in Malta. That's if it ever gets completed with the supply chain shortages and lead times on quartz and silicon carbide tooling.