Intel About to Acquire Nvidia?

The ink wasn't even dry on the AMD-ATI merger (and the merger hasn't even been completed yet, to be precise) when people started gossiping about another chipmaker-graphics merger that would almost certainly follow suit. Namely, Intel and Nvidia. After all, if AMD+ATI made sense, Intel+Nvidia made even more.

In many ways, that's true. Intel has long dabbled in graphics and it's arguably the #1 graphics chip manufacturer in the world: Intel's integrated graphics (which have been known under the banner of Intel Media Accelerator and various other names over the years) are omnipresent on the lower-priced PCs and laptops of the world, which don't come standard with dedicated graphics cards. Purchasing Nvidia could give Intel an entry to the high-end (and high-profit) graphics world that it's never played in before. AMD is already talking about building chips that integrate CPU and GPU features on one piece of silicon, and as Intel rolls out quad-core chips, possibly by the end of the year, this architecture is looking more and more likely. (The theory goes that with, say, an eight-core chip, you might have four cores doing general CPU work and another four doing graphics.)

While many are skeptical that Intel will actually make such a purchase, it certainly seems like an inevitability. The current method that graphics card makers adhere to is simply adding more CPUs on add-in boards, then adding more boards to PCs. Power consumption and heat on these rigs are starting to get ridiculous, and this market is headed the same direction as the old Pentium chips, which ultimately got too big and hot to handle. Multi-core changed all that, and it will eventually do the same for graphics as well. In the short term, Intel could put four Nvidia GPU cores on an add-in card. In the long term, it could put those cores right on the CPU die, as described above.

The rumor is that Intel will announce this acquisition tonight, so we needn't wait long to find out if the speculation is true or if it's just people trying to drive up Nvidia's stock price. Stay tuned for updates!