Huang said that the partnership with Intel would have no bearing on its Arm products, and that development on those products would continue.
“We’re fully committed to the Arm roadmap,” Huang said, mentioning a number of upcoming products, including future generations of its Vera CPU architecture.
Finally, there’s the question of where these chips will be built. Nvidia’s current chips are manufactured mostly at TSMC, though it has used Samsung’s factories as recently as the RTX 3000 series. Intel also uses TSMC to build some chips, including its current top-end laptop and desktop processors, but it uses its own factories to build its server chips, and plans to bring its next-generation consumer chips back in-house.
Will Nvidia start to manufacture some of its chips on Intel’s 18A manufacturing process, or another process on Intel’s roadmap? A vote of confidence from Nvidia would be a big shot in the arm for Intel’s foundry, which has reportedly struggled to find major customers—but it’s hard to see Nvidia doing it if Intel’s manufacturing processes can’t compete with TSMC’s on performance or power consumption, or if Intel can’t manufacture chips in the volumes that Nvidia would need.
Huang didn’t close the door to working with Intel on manufacturing, but responded to multiple questions about it by heaping praise on TSMC, suggesting that the manufacturer was a known quantity that Nvidia was in no rush to stop working with.
“We’ve always evaluated Intel’s foundry technology, and we’re going to continue to do that,” said Huang. “I think Lip-Bu and I would both say that TSMC is a world-class foundry, and in fact, we’re both very successful customers of TSMC’s. The capabilities of TSMC, from process technology, their rhythm of execution, the scale of their capacity and infrastructure, the agility of their business operations… just all of the magic that comes together for being a world-class foundry, supporting customers of such diverse needs. I just can’t overstate the magic that is TSMC.”
This article was updated to add details from a conference call with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.