Former Intel CEO Paul Otellini presented the idea of Intel buying Nvidia, but the board resisted it, according to a new report. Back then, in 2005, AMD and ATi were two separate companies, and Nvidia was primarily a gaming GPU maker, rather than the AI data center behemoth of today. Having one of the top GPU makers in Intel’s stable could have changed the PC landscape as we know it, perhaps with Intel CPU designs containing integrated Nvidia GeForce GPUs.
If this had happened, we wouldn’t just be looking at a very different landscape when it comes to the best gaming CPU battle, but also the best graphics card war. At this time, the mooted price for Nvidia was reportedly $20 billion, almost four times the $5.4 billion total AMD paid for ATi with a mix of cash and stock, while Intel itself was worth around $150 billion.
The new report comes from the New York Times, which claims to have spoken to two anonymous people “familiar with the boardroom discussion.” According to the sources, Otellini presented the prospect in the Intel boardroom, with some executives at the company reportedly being on board with the idea.
However, the Intel board reportedly pushed back, as the purchase would have ended up being Intel’s priciest acquisition ever, by a long, long way, and “Intel has a poor record of absorbing companies.” Otellini, who died in 2017, reportedly then backed off, and that was the end of the idea, but one of the sources goes on to describe the result of the meeting as “a fateful moment,” when seen with the benefit of hindsight.
After that, Intel instead decided to invest heavily in an in-house GPU project called Larrabee, based on multiple Pentium processing cores working in tandem, but it ended up being canceled. Intel also invested in real-time ray tracing on x86 cores, rather than GPUs, but couldn’t get the frame rates required to make it a reality on a standard desktop rig. It’s only in the last few years that Intel has properly invested in making traditional full-fat GPUs, such as the Intel Arc A770, and its market share is tiny compared to that of Nvidia.
It’s hard to say how such a deal could have worked out in practice. We can point to Nvidia’s huge dominance now compared to Intel, but it could have all gone in a different direction with Intel at the helm, where early resources may well have been focused on integrating GPUs into CPUs. $20 billion was also a huge amount for a company of Intel’s size, and it would take a long time before the fruits of Intel and Nvidia joining up were realized. AMD also financially struggled for a good few years after buying ATi, despite its APUs offering the best integrated graphics tech on the desktop.
Imagine it, though. Would all the latest consoles be using Intel CPUs with Nvidia integrated GPUs now? Would we be experiencing the same AI boom now if Nvidia had been bought by Intel instead? The gaming PC and the wider tech world could have been very, very different if this reported boardroom discussion had gone in a different direction, and perhaps Intel wouldn’t be in such a dire financial situation now either.
For more information on what Intel and Nvidia are doing now, check out our Intel Arrow Lake guide, where we run you through the specs of its latest desktop CPUs, and our Nvidia RTX 5000 guide, where we round up all the latest rumors about the next generation of graphics cards.
