Way back in the mid-late 2000s Intel CPUs could be used with third party chipsets not manufactured by Intel. This had been going on forever but the space was particularly wild with Nvidia being the most popular chipset manufacturer for AMD and also making in-roads for Intel CPUs. It was an important enough market than when ALi introduced AMD chipsets that were better than Nvidia's they promptly bought the company and spun down operations.

This was all for naught as AMD purchased ATi, shutting out all other chipsets and Intel did the same. Things actually looked pretty grim for Nvidia at this point in time. AMD was making moves that suggested APUs were the future and Intel started releasing platforms with very little PCIe connectivity, prompting Nvidia to build things like the Ion platform that could operate over an anemic pcie 1x link. There were really were the beginnings of strategic moves to lock Nvidia out of their own market.

Fortunately, Nvidia won a lawsuit against Intel that required them to have pcie 16x connectivity on their main platforms for 10 years or so and AMD put out non-competitive offerings in the CPU space such that the APU take off never happened. If Intel had actually developed their integrated GPUs or won that lawsuit or if AMD had actually executed Nvidia might well be an also-ran right around now.

To their credit, Nvidia really took advantage of their competitors inability to press their huge strategic advantage during that time. I think we're in a different landscape at the moment. Neither AMD nor Intel can afford boot Nvidia since consumers would likely abandon them for whoever could still slot in an Nvidia card. High performance graphics is the domain of add-in boards now and will be for awhile. Process node shrinks aren't as easy and cooling solutions are getting crazy.

But Nvidia has been shut out of the new handheld market and haven't been a good total package for consoles as SoC both rule the day in those spaces so I'm not super surprised at the desire for this pairing. But I did think nvidia had given up these ambitions was planning to try to build an adjacent ARM based platform as a potential escape hatch.

Xe2 is superior to current AMD integrated already

> Intel graphics have been closing the gap with AMD and are now within what? A factor of 2 or less (1.5?)

Apart from that APU(395+) from AMD, intel iGPU is on par with AMD right now.

The 395+ is more like dGPU and CPU on same die.

Intel hasn't had desktop GPUs for a long time. Your timescale is off compared to how long AMD and Nvidia have had to polish their GPUs.

I'm curious, why do you type it as nVidia instead of NVIDIA or Nvidia ?

I think it is bad news for the GPU market (AMD has had a beachhead with their integrated solution here as they've lost out elsewhere) but good for x86 which I've worried would be greatly diminished as Intel became less competitive.

I just realized there's worse possibility. They might offer it as successor to xx50/60 RTX GPUs to unsupport CUDA on low ends.

Absolutely. This is terrible news for high emission gamers, who have been living under the boot of Nvidia for decades.

The ryzen APUs had a rocky start but are properly good now, the concept is sound

apple never shipped a product with that, but it made for an excellent hackintosh