NVIDIA (NVIDIA) and Intel recently announced the joint development of customized x86 SoC, combining Intel processor architecture and NVIDIA RTX GPU die to create a new integrated platform. The industry points out that this cooperation will not only change the existing processor market structure, but will also bring new procurement and operational challenges to PC brands such as Acer, Asus, and MSI.
For a long time, the CPU market in the PC market has been mainly monopolized by two major manufacturers, Intel and AMD, and brand manufacturers only need to allocate orders and product lines between the two. However, in recent years, Arm camps such as Qualcomm and MediaTek have been actively promoting the Windows on Arm platform, and competition with the third architecture has begun to appear in the notebook market. If Intel and NVIDIA are added to develop x86 SoC in the future, the overall supply chain will be more complex, and the difficulty of production and procurement for brand owners will inevitably increase significantly.
Different architectures require their own motherboards, firmware, and cooling modules. As a result, components cannot be shared, the development process overlaps, and the after-sales system must also be redesigned. According to industry analysis, the supply chain of OEM factories will transform from the past "centralized procurement" to "multi-line parallelism", which will not only weaken the economies of scale, but also make the coordination of delivery, inventory and production schedule more difficult.
As NVIDIA enters the CPU field, the PC ecosystem will also shift from "open combination" to "integrated closed". In the past, brands could freely match Intel/AMD processors and independent GPUs. Now, if SoC adopts an integrated architecture, the autonomy of product design and cost configuration will be limited. In addition, the rapid rise of the Arm platform has also made software and driver support more fragmented, forcing OEMs to maintain multiple versions of systems and applications at the same time.
Analysts pointed out that this competition jointly triggered by the NVIDIA, Intel, AMD and Arm camps will redefine the supply chain power structure of the PC industry. In the short term, brand owners will inevitably bear cost and integration pressure, but in the long term, multi-architecture competition may also push the PC market into a more innovative era of integration.
NVIDIA-Intel Deal Around x86 CPUs Will Cause “Operational Headaches” For PC Brands; Acer CEO Highlights a Unique Angle