Having said all that, all of the graphics companies need to be aware of one other looming problem, Intel. I know, the general consensus of opinion is that Intel is out of graphics, but the truth is potentially more damaging to the graphics industry than the price dumping of the 740. Let's see if I can work Sony into this, somehow.

Sony does have the PC industry worried, but Intel isn't the kind of company to sit and ponder. Intel is moving more and more of its resources into reducing the cost of a PC platform in order to remain competitive in the consumer market, and to position the company for potential opportunities in other set-top box type devices. I say, potential opportunities because, there are a lot of projections and notions regarding Internet appliances and digital set-top boxes, but the real markets for such devices are still some ways off. In the meantime, Intel is going to do what it can to maintain the price of its silicon, and that means putting more functionality on every chip, and eating up the graphics market that way. After all, I am sure Intel wouldn't be too unhappy if it could get its own Emotion Engine.

Therefore, were I a graphics company, I would be very worried about Intel backing out of graphics chips. It means that Intel is not going to compete head to head with the other graphics chip companies, but is going to leverage its architecture to take their market share away from them in other ways. That's been an obvious threat in the past, but Intel never had any real opportunity to integrate graphics into its growth strategy while it was consistently upgrading the PC industry every two years with a new CPU. The idea that Intel can keep pushing raw MIPS, and continue the cyclic upgrade of high-end PCs is getting old.