If you told me 25 years ago that Intel would end up in decline, that Nvidia would buy a chunk of the ailing company, and that the two would partner to build chips that integrate Intel x86 CPU cores with Nvidia’s RTX GPU cores, I would’ve called you crazy. But here we are. Nvidia has acquired a $5 billion stake in Intel—roughly 5 percent of the company. “For personal computing, we’re going to create new Intel x86 SoCs that integrate Nvidia GPU chiplets, fusing the world’s best CPU and GPU, to redefine the PC experience,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on an investor call following the announcement.  The announcement made headlines and for good reason. This alliance will create a monster that Intel and Nvidia’s competitors—namely, AMD and Qualcomm—will struggle to defeat. A chip alliance that can’t be beat The development of a chip that fuses Intel x86 cores with Nvidia RTX graphics will be a huge deal for all the obvious reasons. Nvidia rules PC graphics with an iron fist, but currently lacks an integrated graphics play. That’s created a few safe spaces—like portable gaming laptops and gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck—where Nvidia’s advantages are irrelevant. It also provides an even playing field between Intel and AMD CPUs in high-end laptops, where said CPUs are paired with Nvidia’s discrete graphics. A laptop maker’s choice between an Intel and AMD CPU is mostly about the performance and power draw of each, not how tightly the CPU integrates with Nvidia’s GPU. An Intel-Nvidia chip obliterates that balance. Nvidia, AMD, Intel Suddenly, Nvidia integrated graphics in portable PCs looks entirely plausible. A tight integration between Intel x86 cores and Nvidia RTX graphics will provide efficiencies in SoC design, power draw, and feature set that AMD and Qualcomm simply can’t match. And it’s no better in high-end laptops. An Intel-Nvidia alliance will make it easy for Intel to convince laptop makers they should pick Intel. They’re all going to use Nvidia GPUs anyway, so why choose to build a laptop around an AMD SoC with Nvidia discrete graphics if they could instead build around a complete Intel-Nvidia SoC? Qualcomm is even worse off. The company doesn’t offer discrete graphics support at this time, and its integrated graphics solutions are far behind the curve. The company was already playing catch-up in the graphics race, and an Intel-Nvidia chip alliance now moves the finish line several miles further away. Is this the start of a new duopoly? The threat of an Intel-Nvidia alliance is so severe that it raises questions about how regulators will view them if they’re successful at market. As the latest Steam Hardware Survey shows, Nvidia’s dominance in both laptop and desktop graphics is close to absolute. (I personally find this a bit odd, as I’ve put my money on AMD the last few times I needed a new GPU. But apparently I’m in the minority.) As it stands, Nvidia’s PC video card market share sits at a massive 74.88 percent. And Nvidia’s lead is arguably even greater than that figure suggests because most of the non-Nvidia market share stems from Intel and AMD integrated graphics. AMD’s most popular discrete graphics product—the RX 6600—is the 30th most common GPU in the survey. That puts it behind ancient Nvidia GPUs like the GTX 1050 Ti and RTX 2060. Joel Lee / Foundry Intel’s command of the CPU market is less absolute, with a roughly 60-40 split in favor of Intel over AMD. The data also shows that AMD’s CPU share leans towards high-end parts with a clock speed of 3GHz or better, while Intel’s CPUs appear to be a mix of low, mid, and high-end options. But Steam actually skews the results in AMD’s favor, as the company’s consumer CPUs are particularly excellent for gaming. Other non-gaming data sources show that AMD’s consumer CPU market share is still under 25 percent. That’s largely due to laptops and low-end desktops, where Intel CPUs remain the most common choice. These figures paint a grim picture for competition in the consumer PC arena. An Intel-Nvidia alliance pairs the consumer CPU market leader with the consumer GPU market leader—and the result is a monster that eats up whatever gains we’ve seen in hardware competition recently. Further reading: Intel Arc graphics face a murky future after Nvidia’s $5B RTX mashup Say bye to desktop graphics as we know it I suspect this alliance could herald long-anticipated changes in the PC hardware world, and one of the biggest changes wrought by Intel-Nvidia GPUs will be the death of discrete graphics as we know it. Here’s the issue: discrete graphics kinda suck. They duplicate silicon, including memory, that could be more tightly integrated. They make it difficult—even impossible—to pass workloads from CPU to GPU, forcing these powerful components to function in silos. They’re inefficient. An integrated approach—with all memory shared across the CPU, GPU, and NPU—is superior. It cuts down on duplication of memory resources, as well as the shared silicon on each chip, and significantly reduces latency when moving tasks across each. This is exactly the advantage of Apple’s in-house silicon and AMD’s Ryzen AI Max. Alex Esteves / Foundry The efficiencies provided by an integrated GPU were traditionally most important in mobile, where space and power are at a premium. But recent GPUs have shown these issues are relevant to desktops, too. Desktop GPUs are physically massive and draw so much power that they can melt power connectors. Yet they also, due to cost constraints, have relatively slim pools of memory, with even top consumer models limited to a measly 32GB of VRAM and most stuck at 16GB or less. While I expect that Intel and Nvidia will focus first on laptop chips, which represent the bulk of the PC market, the same advantages also apply to the desktop. I think the future of the desktop PC will look a lot like the Framework Desktop, which is built around AMD’s Ryzen AI Max—but instead of that, we’re looking at Intel-Nvidia SoCs. That means you could kiss upgradeable discrete desktop graphics goodbye. Okay, then. What’s the good news? I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the potential upheaval that will come from this Intel-Nvidia alliance, and it might sound like bad news for competition in the PC market. Still, there are a few reasons to hope that it will work out for the better. Maybe Nvidia will drag its feet and the number of Intel-Nvidia chips that come to market will be few. I don’t think this will happen, as Huang says Nvidia will “be quite a large supplier of GPU chiplets into Intel x86 SoCs.” And ailing Intel has plenty of incentive to turn those chiplets into products quickly. But company politics, like all politics, are messy… so there’s always the possibility that one or both partners will falter in their alliance. Gordon Mah Ung / Foundry Any delay could give AMD the chance to strike back. I’m sure AMD will respond to the Intel-Nvidia alliance by reminding everyone that AMD’s Ryzen AI Max has similar advantages as a potential Intel-Nvidia SoC, and it’s available right now. However, Ryzen AI Max’s availability is currently limited to just a handful of end-user PCs. The threat of an Intel-Nvidia SoC could force AMD to accelerate its plans to broaden its reach. I also think that, in the short term, this is an obvious win for PC buyers and enthusiasts. Intel-Nvidia SoCs are likely to be hits in both performance and battery life, and they’ll probably be competitive on price without the need to replicate costly memory across CPU and GPU. The resulting laptops and desktops could deliver better bang for your buck than any PC SoC to date. Dominant Intel-Nvidia SoCs might cause problems if they crowd out competition, but that’s years down the road. No matter how you slice it, it’s clear that this announcement is a big deal for consumer PCs. It’s also clear that when the planned Intel-Nvidia SoCs come to market, the PC is likely to be forever changed. Further reading: Intel’s deal with Nvidia could utterly rewrite the future of laptops Read...

Question time is known for quick quips and the potential for gotcha moments, but MPs are constantly testing the boundaries of the rules. Read...

I’ve had Starlink at home for over a month now and I’m impressed. It feels like magical space age tech, with a small white dish on my roof giving me high-speed internet even though I’m in the middle of nowhere. With huge hills blocking affordable fiber installation and vast hectares of trees surrounding me on all sides, I’d normally be cut off from modern civilization. Starlink gets me online and I’m grateful for that. But Starlink isn’t perfect and it certainly isn’t the right choice for most homes. Once you know all the “gotchas,” you might find that it isn’t so appealing after all—or maybe one of those gotchas is a deal-breaker. If you’re thinking of getting Starlink at home, here are several questions you need to consider before you do. If you can’t answer “Yes” to all of them, you might want to look into alternative solutions. Are you rural enough? Plenty of regions around the country still lack broadband internet, and the number one reason for that is they’re too rural. They’re too far from existing infrastructure with too few potential customers, meaning it just isn’t worth it for companies to dig and run that much cabling. If you live in a place that’s remote enough that your high-speed internet options are poor at best (or non-existent at worst), then Starlink can be a good last resort. Its coverage map is almost universal at this point, with availability throughout North America and Europe, as well as large sections of South America, Australasia, and Africa. In short, if you’re reading this article, you can probably get access to Starlink. Just make sure to check your other options first though, because even though Starlink is fast, it’s nowhere close to fiber. (Other satellite internet services exist, but they tend to have worse latency, making them ill-suited to tasks like video calling and gaming.) Are you okay with slow upload speeds? Starlink’s download speeds are pretty great. Despite recently moving to a remote corner of the country, my internet is faster now with Starlink. I went from a basic 70 Mbps fiber plan to a Starlink package that offers between 150 Mbps and 300 Mbps depending on the time of day and the weather (more on that below). That’s plenty fast for files, streaming, gaming, and anything else besides. What I do wish I had, though, was faster uploads. One of the core features of gigabit fiber broadband is that it’s usually fast across both download and upload rates. With Starlink, you might get 30 Mbps uploads if you’re lucky—the rest of the time, you’re stuck closer to 10 or 15 Mbps. That’s fine for sending photos or short videos to friends, but nowhere near fast enough for uploading lots of data to the cloud or streaming 4K footage over YouTube or Twitch. Can you afford it? Starlink is more expensive than standard broadband or fiber internet. Whereas most home internet providers are competing with each other—and thus keeping prices somewhat reasonable—Starlink holds a bit of a monopoly in the low-latency, high-bandwidth satellite internet market. That means Starlink can, for now, charge whatever it wants. The standard residential package with unlimited data and 150 to 300 Mbps downloads is $120/month. You also have to buy the dish and router, which costs $175 plus taxes (that’s with a 50% discount) as of this writing. And don’t forget installation costs if you don’t want to mount it yourself. Starlink sells that service for $185 through approved third-party contractors. (You might have a handy friend or family member who can do it for you more cheaply, but that comes with its own risks.) All in, that first month of Starlink will likely cost you around $400 if you pay for installation. Comparatively, you can grab a gigabit AT&T residential fiber package for $65/month plus taxes and $99 installation fee with no need to mount a dish on your roof. Is your sky clear enough? Whereas fiber internet needs an underground connection to a fiber network, Starlink connects to its network through the sky—a network that happens to be orbiting hundreds of miles above our heads. Other satellite internet companies have one or two satellites at extreme distances always in view, but Starlink satellites are zooming by in low-Earth orbit, so your dish is constantly switching satellites. That means you need a sky view that’s as clear as possible all the time. (Yes, the latest generation of Starlink satellites and dishes with “Beam Switching” are better at dealing with momentary obstructions like tree branches, but there’s no denying you’ll have a better experience with a clear sky.) Weather is a factor, too. Light rain is fine and thin cloud cover doesn’t make a huge difference. But thick clouds? Snow? Heavy rain? Sandstorms? Smog? All of that can limit Starlink performance and even cause connection drops at times. Are you okay giving your money to SpaceX and Elon Musk? Without delving too much into politics, it’s fair to say that the company behind Starlink (SpaceX) and its CEO (Elon Musk) have been controversial over the past few years. Some might even call them immoral. SpaceX has repeatedly been criticized for its pollution problems (with spacecraft breaking up in the atmosphere and washing up on shores) and Starlink satellites ruining astronomical images with their light pollution. Elon Musk involved himself in US elections and the US government, wreaking havoc with DOGE and other initiatives. The hard truth is that Starlink has no real competition right now. It may be the only option for you, but if you decide to go with it, you have to be aware of where your payments are ultimately going. I’d love to take my money elsewhere if I could. Unfortunately, there’s nowhere else I can take it… yet. Are you comfortable using a VPN? Starlink, like any ISP, can peek at your internet activity at any time. That’s no big deal if you aren’t up to anything nefarious or legally dubious. But if your internet habits do stray into gray areas, or if you care to maintain your privacy from CEOs like Elon Musk, then you’ll need to learn how to use a VPN and get comfortable with it real fast. There are many posts on the Starlink subreddit about people getting copyright strikes in the mail after torrenting files over Starlink. If that’s something you might be caught out by, make sure you know how to use a VPN before taking out a Starlink subscription. A virtual private network (VPN) is basically an app that encrypts your internet traffic so no one can snoop, and also shields your IP address so your web activity can’t be traced back to you. If you don’t have one, get started with one of our top pick VPNs depending on your needs. Read...

Donald Trump`s second state visit will see a crowded mix of royal pageantry, trade talks and international politics. Read...

Analysis: The disenchantment turns up in nearly every aspect of the latest RNZ-Reid Research poll. Read...

There is no agreement yet on what politics inspired the alleged shooter, the answers may be hiding in plain sight in the obscure corners of the internet. Read...

It`s still not clear exactly why the Greens` Right to Repair Bill faltered at select committee stage, after extensive cross-party collaboration on the details. Read...

The director general says the corporation is `aware of the concerns` around Israel`s participation. Read...

Anne Batley-Burton says she is putting her hand up to do something about the problems in her community. Read...

The government`s 2025 budget was finally agreed this week. The last major hurdle involved a long walk through a political minefield of questions, and even some answers. Read...