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NVIDIA CEO: "We're Going to Open a Can of Whoop Ass" |
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Written by Daniel
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Friday, 11 April 2008 |
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Any notion that Intel and NVIDIA have common ground in the graphics industry can now be easily dismissed
Kristopher Kubicki (Blog) - April 10, 2008 3:12 PM NVIDIA's already candid CEO Jen-Hsun Huang had more than a few things to say during the company's financial analyst meeting today. An hour into the call Huang began to ad lib; clearly something was on his mind.
"We're going to open a can of whoop ass," he told analysts, whom quickly broke out into laughter.
For the past two weeks Intel and NVIDIA have been playing a game of cloak and dagger with technology press, complete with secret slide shows and secret slide show rebuttals. At the heart of this covert battle is the integrated graphics market, and some of the claims attached to it.
Intel senior vice president Pat Gelsinger fired the first volley at the Intel Developer Forum last week in Shanghai. "First, graphics that we have all come to know and love today, I have news for you. It's coming to an end. Our multi-decade old 3D graphics rendering architecture that's based on a rasterization approach is no longer scalable and suitable for the demands of the future," he said.
Gelsinger's bold statement was an introduction to Intel's upcoming Larrabee graphics architecture, but it was enough to put NVIDIA on full alert. Larrabee is Intel's first attempt at a discrete graphics processor in nearly a decade, with first samples expected to ship and stay competitive with NVIDIA and AMD graphic processors.
Intel slide decks presented to media argue that spending money on CPUs and more CPU cores makes more sense than spending money on GPUs. Intel presentations go on to detail that its integrated graphics will still satisfy consumers for years, adding that its upcoming Nehalem architecture will come in variants that integrate GMA 4500 (G45) graphics directly onto the CPU package. [DailyTech..] [Comments...] |
