Intel Starts the Trash Talk

A story in Maximum PC relates what it calls the ’start of the impending doom for nVidia’. This is, of course, the gospel according to Intel, so mileage may vary.

The war of words and bad blood between Intel and Nvidia continues to spiral out of control, and Intel is back at it again. After making some rather pointed remarkets about Ions shortcomings, Intel decoded the time was right to warn the geek masses about Nvidia’s impending doom at the Goldman Sachs Technology conference in San Francisco. According to Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini, Nvidia is merely trying to defend the status quo, and that Larrabee will be the future choice for those in search of powerful dedicated graphics solutions. Oddly enough, Intel choose its words very carefully and mysteriously made no mention of AMD’s ATI division.

Most enthusiasts I’m sure see these statements as a bit overconfident, and the 2010 release of Larrabee is the real wild card in the equation. Even if Intel manages to churn out the most powerful GPU, it’s unlikely they would have the type of driver optimization, developer support, or backwards compatibility that have made the ATI/ Nvidia GPU’s the most important component in any gaming PC. Clearly however, dedicated GPU companies should be concerned over CPU+GPU solutions for mainstream users. If GP-GPU applications don’t take hold in time to win over the mainstream consumer, Nvidia and ATI risk find themselves severing a much smaller niche market that could be devastating to both companies.

It seems rather strange that Intel should be shooting its collective mouth off, considering it has never produced anything better than the most mediocre graphics solutions (does anyone else remember the i740?)

nVidia, on the other hand, has been the kind of success story that everyone likes to see, and has never talked long and hard about anything it could not produce. Every time ATi has come back with an answer to nVidia’s best, nVidia was soon there with a counterpunch, or knockout. During the entire lifespan of nVidia, Intel has never made any moves toward the high-end of graphics, seeming content to hold the lowest common denominator of the corporate desktop.

With the latest from AMD, Intel is surely finding that hard to maintain. Intel and Nehalem may have the crown of performance, but AMD and the Athlon64 coupled with ATi graphics bundled surely must be giving the people in Santa Clara a few fitful nights.

Since nVidia has branched into mainboard chipsets, and remains on the cutting edge of graphics design, I doubt that Larrabee is of that much concern.

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A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.Fred Allen

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