NVIDIA and Intel War To Start In 2010

The Intel-NVIDIA war heeds warning from CRT Captial Group, saying NVIDIA maybe providing motivation to the chip giant. CRT Captial Group analyst Ashok Kumar issued a warning stating the recent tirade by NVIDIA CEO, Jen-sun Huang may have adverse effects – angering a “huge, rich, motivated design powerhouse.”

Kumar believes NVIDIA’s current products are better than Intel’s offerings, but mentions Huang is greatly overlooking Intel’s lack of interest in the high-end 3D-gaming market, and thus the reason why NVIDIA is so successful.

Many saw Huang’s outburst as NVIDIA’s attempt to gain higher ground before an upcoming epic battle between NVIDIA and Intel. The battle is due out in 2010 and is known as Larrabee, a multicore x86 chip as a discrete graphics card from Intel. Along with support for OpenGL and DirectX, Intel announced the chip design will include SSE-like extensions known as Advanced Vector Extensions.

Early reports on Larrabee showed chip designs incorporating 16-cores, with each core capable of operating over 2 GHz. Intel claims Larrabee is capable to scaling to several thousand cores.

Larrabee’s main attraction so far has been its potential as a ray-tracing chip. However, in a recent blog by Tom Forsyth, a developer on the Larrabee project, Intel’s primary design focus was on rasterization since it would be the only way to render the large library of DirectX and OpenGL games on the market. NVIDIA’s ongoing “war” with Intel started with Huang adlibbing during a financial analyst meeting, stating NVIDIA was about to “open a can of whoop ass” on Intel.

Huang further belittled Intel’s graphics solutions as a “joke” and being abysmal in the visual computing world. NVIDIA’s VP of content relations added to the fire with a declaration that the CPU is dead.