Lip-Bu Tan says 'Intel and Nvidia are collaborating to develop exciting new products' and I'm wondering what they could possibly be

Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, was recently awarded an honorary doctorate in science and technology from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Intel's CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, was the one to give Huang his doctoral hood. At the same time, Tan took the opportunity to affirm that Intel and Nvidia are working on new products.

In the post congratulating Jensen Huang, Tan says, "Intel and Nvidia are collaborating to develop exciting new products!"

We have known about collaboration between the two companies for some time. Late last year, Intel and Nvidia announced combined CPU and GPU products for use in both consumer PCs and AI servers. To add to this, Nvidia took a $5 billion stake in Intel.

And just last month, there was a rumour that some future Nvidia AI GPUs will use Intel Foundry technology for some of their components. So this new statement only adds to the sudden companionship between the two now financially-linked companies.

It's even currently suggested that Intel's Serpent Lake will be its first collaboration chip with Nvidia. This chip is supposed to be going super heavy on the GPU for AI workloads and will reportedly have Nvidia's next-gen Rubin GPU technology and will support LPDDR6 memory. Memory crisis be damned.

Nvidia can no longer rely on Chinese trade, due in part to global tensions, and diversifying production away from TSMC doesn't seem like an awful move with that in mind. The US Government has also made it clear that it prefers chips made on US soil.

All of this is a far cry from how bad things looked for Intel just a few years ago. But things have been looking a bit more hopeful for the company as of late. Panther Lake testing shows that its latest mobile chips are surprisingly performant and power efficient. Late last year, the US Government gave financial support to the company, with it taking even more if Intel lost control of its chip manufacturing business, so it's in both Intel's and the US Government's interest for both to thrive.

Working with Nvidia, being a company worth $5 trillion, seems like a pretty good way of making that happen. Though whether this relationship amounts to much is yet to be seen.