Acer Chairman and CEO Jason Chen stated during the company’s annual Long Time Smile Awards that the Nvidia–Intel partnership, which will produce new x86 chips, could potentially complicate the PC supply chain for most manufacturers. According to Digitimes, Chen said that multiple generations of x86 chips from both Intel and AMD are already proving to be complicated— the entry of Nvidia as a third potential supplier will likely make procurement and inventory management much more challenging.
PC makers must consider the cost, performance, and power consumption of each processor to position them in the market effectively, but the existence of multiple generations of chips is making this so much more difficult. For example, Intel recently raised the prices of its Raptor Lake chips because of increasing demand, even though it’s a generation behind the latest Arrow Lake processors. AMD also just launched the Ryzen 3 5100, based on the AM4 platform and using the five-year-old Zen 3 architecture.
