Nvidia, Intel no longer appear to be prospective partners

NVidia, Intel no longer appear to be prospective partners
By Michael Hatamoto, BetaNews
April 11, 2008, 5:42 PM

During an analyst meeting yesterday, the head of NVidia stated clearly
that NVidia is a GPU company and not a semiconductor manufacturer,
destroying any flicker of hope that it and Intel may jointly combat
AMD and its ATI division.

"We're going to open a can of whoop ass," boasted NVidia CEO Jen-Hsun
Huang during an NVidia Financial Day analyst meeting yesterday,
invoking a word that BetaNews' own automatic comments parser system
would splash an asterisk in the middle of.

The verbal jousting began last week in Shanghai at the Intel Developer
Forum in Shanghai, when Intel representatives boldly stated that
discrete graphics cards will eventually become "unnecessary" for the
regular consumer in the future. According to Intel, multi-core CPUs
would be the final blow and end consumer need for multi-GPU
technology, with Intel believing multi-core CPUs are powerful enough
to render high-end graphics in video games and other graphic-intensive
activities.

Most notably from NVidia's perspective, Intel plans to have samples of
Larrabee, its 16-core multi-pipeline graphics processor component,
available in Q4 this year, with public shipment beginning sometime in
2009.

During the Financial Analyst day yesterday, NVidia provided several
slides that indicate current Intel integrated graphics technology will
only become competitive with today's sub-$100 discrete cards from both
AMD/ATI and NVidia, in two years' time. However, NVidia's technology
available today will still be able to outperform Intel's integrated
solution as far out as 2010.

"Intel has crossed the line and they're saying false things," Huang
said after calling the Larrabee platform "Laughabee."

While NVidia is generally known as a consumer-oriented manufacturer, a
growing share of its revenue comes from the high-performance computing
(HPC) market. NVidia's push towards HPC means it will likely bump
heads against Intel, where increased graphics leads to better compute
performance. After Larrabee launches in 2010, analysts expect the
platform to first have a strong impact on the HPC market.

After NVidia's Huang slammed Intel for poor performance over the
company's claims that its integrated GMA 3100 graphics is Windows
Vista Premium compatible -- a claim recently proven incorrect by
Microsoft employees -- Intel pointed at NVidia video card drivers as
the culprit for a large number of Windows Vista crashes.

"NVidia has to support several new titles every week," Huang
countered. "You already have the right machine to run Excel. You
bought it four years ago. How much faster can you render the blue
screen of death?"

Intel PR manager Dan Snyder would only go so far today as to tell
BetaNews, "We are not surprised, based on what NVidia's CEO has been
publicly saying for months."

Even though Intel is known as a CPU company, it still has a 43% market
share of overall graphics chip shipments in 4Q 2007 -- taking all
those integrated chips into account -- with NVidia controlling a 33%
share.

http://www.betanews.com/article/NVid...ers/1207950127