By now, surely everyone who has an interest in video card technology has heard about, or read an account of, the head of nVidia stating to the faithful that nVidia was going to open up a can of whoop-ass on Intel. Less apparent is what is meant by that, as currently, and for the foreseeable future nothing that Intel offers, can compete in any way with the offerings of the company with the eery green logo.

In the several stories published, there seems to be lots of blustering by Intel concerning an upcoming project with code name Larabee (I checked, and can’t find a Larabee river in Oregon, so it is unsure where the name derivation is from). With a little more digging, it seems that Intel is on the wrong track with their graphics project, as they tend to believe that any graphics code developed in-house will soon be able to be ‘bolted-on’ to the CPU code and housed within an upcoming offering.

It has been shown, in several long and detailed articles that the type of processing power needed for graphics is very different from that of CPUs, so that, if Intel were to get this idea, the GPU would simply be another core riding on the same piece of silicon. Perhaps, but that seems far off, and would require a major retooling of the basic microcomputer motherboard design. I’m not sure we are ready for that, considering the resistance to change displayed by the abysmal support for the BTX format changes.

When Intel talks about Larabee being an order of magnitude better than what Intel offers today, it is wise to remember that currently Intel on-board graphics are about 10 times slower (hmm, an order of magnitude!) than nVidia on-board graphics, so that anything produced at that level will be no great shakes. Also, we must remember what Intel’s last foray into external graphics brought us - the 740 series…what a killer that was! (and support, it was to not be believed).

What nVidia should do is meet Intel on its own ground, and supply system board makers with mid-line graphics products at a price that will keep the on-board silicon from AMD and Intel simply extraneous fluff.

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Tags: nvidia, intel, graphics processing solutions, can of whoop-ass