ExclusiveNVIDIA Eyes CPU Battle With Intel, AMD as It Entering Center Stage of AI Competition

NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang is increasingly professing his love for the more generalist Central Processing Unit, CPU, in the Artificial Intelligence, AI competition, besides the success of Specialized Graphics Processing Unit's GPUs. ''We love CPUs as well as GPUs,'' Huang said on a call with analysts on Wednesday for the company's fourth quarter results. He assured them that NVIDIA was not only ready for the CPU's return to the spotlight, but also that NVIDIA's own CPU offerings for datacenters, first released in 2023, would out-compete rivals. CPUs and GPUs have served different computing tasks for decades. CPUs are generalist chips designed to handle any mathematical task a software programmer might throw at the chip at a reasonable speed, while GPUs specialize in carrying out a simpler set of mathematical tasks in parallel thousands of times at once. Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bergeron said that AI-related computing is happening more and more, and sometimes primarily on the CPU, as AI companies are increasingly deploying agents that can independently carry out tasks such as writing code, sifting through documents, and writing research reports.