Intel and Nvidia announce partnership to create RTX APUs: Can it challenge AMD’s dominance in handhelds?

On Thursday, September 18, Intel and Nvidia announced an ambitious partnership that effectively challenges AMD's gaming dominance. In 2025, AMD is everywhere in gaming: they power all gaming consoles (both PlayStation 5 and Xbox) and handhelds (Legion Go, ROG Ally X, Steam Deck, and more). Unsurprisingly, AMD alone controls over 60% of the rapidly growing $2 billion handheld PC gaming market.

With Team Green pumping $5 billion in Intel stock, and the two hardware behemoths starting work on integrating x86 CPUs with Nvidia RTX graphics on a single SoC, that could change. Let's look at how the two companies are going to make that happen.

Intel and Nvidia to fabricate gaming-ready APUs to combat AMD

Geforce RTX APUs could be a game-changer for Intel CPUs (Image via Nvidia)

The partnership's key component is Intel x86 CPU chiplets tightly integrated with Geforce RTX GPU chiplets. The benefit of this is more powerful APUs for gaming, alongside better native AI hardware. They plan to integrate the two chips with NVLink, which theoretically delivers 14x more bandwidth than what most gaming PCs use: PCIe.

Additionally, the chip makers are also adopting a trick from ARM's playbook: Unified Memory Access (UMA). This means, like Macs and smartphones, the CPU and GPU will share a single memory pool instead of separate system RAM and VRAM. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang already calls this the "next era of computing."

It's worth noting that this technology isn't completely new. Back in 2017, Intel had embarked on a similar venture with AMD, dubbed "Kaby Lake-G." That failed as the final product was poor in quality. Expert analysts attribute the failure to a lack of unified memory usage and reliance on PCIe.

Beyond the backdrop, the Intel-NVIDIA partnership is well-timed. AMD's latest handheld chip releases have been sloppy. The Z2 Extreme, for example, only offers a modest 1-5 FPS improvement over the last gen despite bundling much superior hardware. Multiple architectural constraints (such as shared memory pools) are already limiting handheld SoC performance.

While both companies have dabbled in fully native hardware-making in the past, Nvidia CPUs have trailed the industry, while Intel's discrete GPUs have had a rocky position due to unstable drivers and optimization. Still, the market responded positively to this announcement. Intel's stock, which hasn't been performing well lately and caused significant disruptions in the tech industry, surged 33%. Unsurprisingly, AMD's stock values dropped 5%. Given Team Green's strong revenue numbers and $3T+ market cap, investors might be weighing Intel more seriously after the partnership.

However, will x86-RTX hybrid chips be the messiah Intel needs to step up its game? Given AMD's RDNA 4 leaks, we're in for a tough fight — one in which PC and handheld gamers win.

Edited by Arka Mukherjee