Not official, but the hints are there
In Nvidia’s official announcement, the company says “Intel will build and offer to the market x86 system-on-chips (SOCs) that integrate Nvidia RTX GPU chiplets. These new x86 RTX SOCs will power a wide range of PCs that demand integration of world-class CPUs and GPUs.” And in Intel’s official announcement, the two will “focus on seamlessly connecting Nvidia and Intel architectures using Nvidia NVLink.”
So, yeah, there aren’t many details here, and neither Nvidia nor Intel are talking about memory. Will the memory be on the GPU itself? Well, Nvidia describes this as “a new class of integrated graphics.” At this point, all major SoCs with integrated graphics—from Apple, AMD, Qualcomm, and even Intel itself—use unified or pooled memory. (Some platforms have memory unified at the hardware level, while others just make it fast for the GPU to share access to the system’s RAM. The key is that the GPU isn’t only stuck with its own small amount of VRAM.)
Mattias Inghe / Foundry
Nvidia and Intel haven’t announced when they’ll ship hardware with this architecture, but multiple analysts expect 2027. This isn’t a one-off partnership, however, and it will continue. The first SoC package won’t be the last, and the architecture will likely evolve… and I believe it’ll move towards closer integration between Intel’s CPUs and Nvidia’s GPUs.
So, while Nvidia and Intel haven’t officially announced unified memory—in fact, they haven’t said anything about memory—it seems like a smart direction. All the talk about a “virtual giant SoC” where the CPU and GPU are “seamlessly connected” is a strong hint about where this is going, and NVLink is another big hint. In its data center products, Nvidia has a form of NVLink (called NVLink-C2C) that allows CPUs and GPUs to use the same pool of memory. (There’s no guarantee that’s what this will be, of course—especially in the first generation.)
Let me wear my informed speculation hat for a second: Nvidia and Intel would both love to deliver a unified memory architecture, but it’ll take multiple hardware generations to get there, and I’d bet Nvidia and Intel engineers are already talking about this as we speak. The first-generation product probably won’t be true unified memory—Intel and Nvidia would be hyping that up in their press releases if it were—but they’re almost certainly moving in that direction.
We’ll have to wait for more details, but Nvidia finally has a plausible path to crushing its competition in the AI PC wars. Nvidia already has the best GPU system; the only missing piece is memory. With Intel on board, Nvidia now has a roadmap to get where it needs to be. But Nvidia and Intel will need time to deliver the right product, and I expect that’s why they’re not talking about memory just yet. Stay tuned.
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