When news broke about a potential collaboration between Intel and Nvidia to develop CPUs featuring integrated Nvidia GPUs, many gamers wondered if this meant a new era for desktop gaming. However, during a recent press conference, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang repeatedly highlighted the massive 150 million laptops sold annually, strongly indicating that this partnership is unlikely to impact your desktop PC choices anytime soon.
Instead, this powerful alliance between Intel and Nvidia appears primarily focused on innovating within the laptop market and datacenter chips. Our existing guides for top-tier gaming laptops already feature machines pairing distinct Intel CPUs with Nvidia GPUs. Meanwhile, AMD has been making significant strides with its impressive CPUs that include integrated Radeon GPUs, as seen in popular devices like the Asus ROG Flow Z13 and Razer Blade 16.
While this is still largely speculative, as Jensen Huang might have been emphasizing just one significant area of opportunity, the lack of any mention regarding desktop PC integration is notable. If the Intel x Nvidia partnership aimed to directly challenge the desktop PC market, we would have likely heard some indication of that intention.
Similarly, there was no discussion about gaming handhelds or dedicated game consoles, sectors where AMD currently holds a dominant position. Most major full-sized consoles utilize custom AMD chips, and the vast majority of gaming handhelds, including the popular Steam Deck, rely on AMD’s Ryzen Z1 Extreme and Ryzen Z2 Extreme processors.
Ultimately, this strategic focus makes perfect sense. In the desktop PC world, simply adding almost any discrete graphics card will always deliver a far greater performance boost than relying on integrated graphics. While Nvidia plans to bring its advanced RTX technology to integrated GPUs, the fundamental physics dictate that the raw processing power of such chips will face similar limitations to AMD’s current integrated graphics solutions.
For example, a recent review of the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G, an impressively capable chip, still showed it managing only an average of 41 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p with low settings. In stark contrast, a dedicated graphics card, even one priced around $250 like the RX 7600, can comfortably achieve over 60 frames per second at high detail settings in the same game.
Despite the speculation, this collaboration is poised to create significant ripples across the PC and computing industries. We’re particularly excited to witness the ensuing competition for supremacy in the gaming laptop arena. What are your thoughts on this announcement? Does its apparent irrelevance to desktop PCs make it less exciting, or do you believe AMD should be concerned? Share your opinions with us on our community Discord server, where you can connect with fellow PC tech and gaming enthusiasts.