AMD look out, NVIDIA and Intel's new chips will target laptops and PC gaming handhelds

In the tech world, it has easily been the biggest story this week (and this month, for that matter), with NVIDIA and Intel announcing a deal where Team Green is investing $5 billion in Team Blue for the development of data center and client/consumer CPUs that will feature NVIDIA's NVLink technology and GeForce RTX graphics.

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This is significant news because it will mark the introduction of the first x86 system-on-chip (SOC) to hit the market, featuring a brand-new architecture that combines Intel's CPU hardware with NVIDIA's GPU hardware. Separate from NVIDIA's recent ARM-based CPU efforts for the AI space, an x86 offering for data centers will open the door for a new tier of NVIDIA (and Intel) hardware built for the AI era.

That said, this partnership is also going to be huge for the consumer space, with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang confirming that, with the notebook and laptop market accounting for around 150 million sales each year, this partnership will "address a vast majority of that consumer PC market, consumer PC notebook market."

• Read more: NVIDIA and MediaTek's AI PC chip sounds perfect for a GeForce RTX-powered PC gaming handheld
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• Read more: NVIDIA inks $5B deal with Intel to build new x86 SoCs with NVIDIA RTX GPUs for consumers

Although Intel has since come out to confirm that this partnership will exist alongside its current GPU efforts that include Core Ultra chips with built-in Arc Graphics, it's safe to say that for premium all-in-one AI and gaming, these Intel and NVIDIA chips are potentially going to shake up the portable SOC PC gaming market, currently dominated by AMD and Ryzen.

Even if the first batch of chips is notebook-only, like we saw with AMD's 'Strix Halo', there will be a rush to see who will be the first to release the first x86-based PC gaming handheld with GeForce RTX technology.

This is exciting for several reasons, but one only has to look at what NVIDIA's Ampere generation hardware is capable of on the Nintendo Switch 2. Granted, this is an ARM-based device, but the power efficiency of the integrated RTX graphics in the Switch 2 is significantly more impressive than that of Ryzen chips with integrated RDNA 2 graphics. And with DLSS 4 delivering fantastic results at 1080p, both handhelds and laptops with these efficient chips should be great for on-the-go PC gaming.

Granted, AMD won't be sitting on the sidelines watching all of this happen. Even though Intel and NVIDIA have already been working on chip design for about a year or so, by the time they come to market, AMD's next-gen Ryzen APUs with integrated next-gen RDNA graphics, and more capable AI hardware for things like FSR 4, should be here. Additionally, with Xbox poised to enter the PC gaming handheld market in a significant way, it's doing so with AMD hardware.

The truth is, even though Intel's Lunar Lake hardware has been well-received, and its second-generation Arc graphics have significantly improved everything from performance to efficiency, the company's widely reported troubles and setbacks have opened the door for AMD to take seemingly complete control of the consumer market. This news from NVIDIA and Intel is massive, and if nothing else, it will open up the door to a level of mobile graphics competition that we haven't seen before.