Around mid-September of last year, Intel and NVIDIA announced a somewhat surprising joint venture. At the time, the two partners teased an eventual deployment of unspecified GeForce RTX iGPU designs within futuristic Intel x86 System-on-Chips (SoCs). We have not heard much about this mainstream project since autumn time—in the meantime, Team Blue has gone all in on hyping up next-gen "Panther Lake-H" mobile processors, that utilize in-house Arc Xe3 graphics architecture. Lately, Lip-Bu Tan—CEO of Intel—has mentioned the existence another co-development with the Green Team. In a recent earnings call, regarding Q4 2025 results, the boss slipped in a brief teaser about an in-progress enterprise-grade processor design.

When discussing his company's ongoing simplification of server product roadmaps, Tan disclosed that: "we also continue to work closely with NVIDIA to build a custom Xeon fully integrated with their NVLink technology, to bring best-in-class x86 performance to AI host nodes." He swiftly moved onto talking about the Xeon division being laser-focused on getting 16-channel "Diamond Rapids" out into the wild. Naturally, it is too early to tell whether the latest Intel + NVIDIA collab will leverage sixth or seventh generation Xeon technologies. The further out "Coral Rapids" family is expected to resurrect Hyper-Threading for datacenter workflows . Tan stated that another main goal is the acceleration of Xeon "Coral Rapids" series' introduction to market. Prior to publication of Intel's Q4 '25 financial results, the semiconductor industry rumor mill proposed a second half of 2027 release window.