NVIDIA VP joins the smack-talk fun, says the Intel CPU is "dead"

Alright, we're loving this new hyper-aggressive, sorta-nasty version of NVIDIA. Not only has CEO Jen Hsun-Huang promised to "open a can of whoop-ass" on Intel, the company has been touting its new sub-$45 integrated platform as far superior to Celeron-based systems, and now we've got VP of Content Relations Roy Taylor sending out emails saying that "a war has started" and pronouncing the Intel CPU "dead." Roy says Intel is "panicking" because CPUs have "run out of steam," and that they "no longer make anything run faster." According to Roy -- whose nickname is "Big Pipe," no joke -- the only thing that needs to get faster is the GPU, and NVIDIA's going to make it happen. That's some brash talk, all around -- let's hope NVIDIA's ready when Intel brings Nehalem out to play. Check out the whole email at the read link.

[Via TGDaily]

[Motoken @ Apr 25th 2008 6:00PM]

ouch, its on, plz bring the popcorn!

[Mr.Tech @ Apr 25th 2008 6:47PM]

I think you mean "Bring on the silver thermal gel!".

[Tired_ @ Apr 25th 2008 7:06PM]

You have strange snack food habits...

[haX0r @ Apr 25th 2008 7:56PM]

Ohhh yaaa.....arctic silver!

[Wisam @ Apr 25th 2008 10:39PM]

Pringles and Pepsi for me pls

[James Freeland @ Apr 25th 2008 6:04PM]

More like "Big Shnoz". Seriously though, nVidia is the shit at graphics cards, no reason why they shouldn't enter the processor market.

[Jack @ Apr 25th 2008 6:09PM]

Same thing could be said about Intel. They are the shit in the CPU market. No reason for them not to really enter the GPU market.

[Zeus.:God @ Apr 25th 2008 6:15PM]

They have really entered the GPU market. They have hundreds of different integrated GPUs on tons of current systems, though I do understand what you were getting at.

[ethana2 @ Apr 25th 2008 7:09PM]

There are three intel gpu's in this house right now, and one ati. ...when I get my new ubuntu dell in a month, it will be the first nvidia gpu i have ever owned, and it's about 2.8 times as performant as the intel integrated option.

[Zorque @ Apr 26th 2008 1:39AM]

Holy shit, did Ethana just mention Ubuntu in an unrelated article?

[adrian @ Apr 26th 2008 12:40PM]

Intel should just buy out Nvidia and strip them of all their technologies.

[slarity @ Apr 25th 2008 6:09PM]

I love it, only thing i disagree with is "processor's dont need to get faster" Wrong, every single part of the computer needs to get faster.

[Othello @ Apr 25th 2008 6:38PM]

"We'll never need more than 16k RAM!"
"Hard Disks? HAH! All you'll ever need will fit on a floppy."
"Computers are for universities and researchers. No one will ever have a computer in their home."

[ethana2 @ Apr 25th 2008 7:10PM]

The bottlenecks now are the hard drives and internet connections.

[Ford Tang @ Apr 25th 2008 6:10PM]

OMG! He must be right! I mean, for one, this is nVidia, and two, they're making all the supercomputers out of GPUs today!

Who even needs CPU?

[Mikey @ Apr 25th 2008 6:28PM]

In the dust...

[Mikey @ Apr 25th 2008 6:30PM]

Sorry, I fail. That was supposed to be directed towards Mam00th's question in the following comment ("And as always, where's AMD?").

[maxz @ Apr 25th 2008 6:14PM]

I think a quote from Kyle Katarn would be quite appropriate here: "You've got to be kidding me..."

[ethana2 @ Apr 25th 2008 7:12PM]

A kyle katarn quote. Wow. Did not expect to see that.

[Josh @ Apr 25th 2008 6:16PM]

This makes me proud to have supported this company for 3 generations of their products now...

[Bender Bending Rodriguez @ Apr 25th 2008 6:17PM]

Sicne when is $9.7 billion in revenue for quarter equal "dead"?

Intel is doing just fine. Chips are increasing in performance and power efficiency.

[Dolemite @ Apr 25th 2008 8:51PM]

Indeed. Intel is really good at what they do, and if they can take on AMD and slaughter them, I am not sure what Nvidia expect to produce from just false bravado and juvenile trash talking.

I know these guys have a large base of returds willing to drop $500 on graphics cards every four months, but Intel is the leviathan, and will just swallow them whole. They are trash-talking publicly because I bet in their meetings, they are shi1ting themselves.

[max @ Apr 25th 2008 6:19PM]

Nvidia has a long way to go by releasing their drivers opensource so we can get some decent drivers for linux, and also stop hogging the h264 action for windows only users, linux not a minority.
on the other hand intel has had opensource drivers for decades, that are the best available ever for the linux market, and is about to release the x4500 gpu that can decode h264. So...think again on what company is really in the lead...

[mappyg @ Apr 25th 2008 6:40PM]

what on earth is wrong with the proprietary drivers?

the open source movement is such bullshit. everything is open source with a disassembler

[ethana2 @ Apr 25th 2008 7:14PM]

You'll find the code comments in binary executables to be rather terse I'm afraid.

[Draaaainage! @ Apr 25th 2008 10:42PM]

Linux users ARE the minority! Why do Linux users think they are some huge chunk of market share? I mean Jesus Christ the total desktop Linux machines that peruse the webs (as of Feb 2008) sits at 0.6%

LESS THAN 1%! What the hell do you think a minority is?

This is not a "Linux sucks" post, I like and use Linux, but c'mon people, let's bring our statements in line with reality here. Linux is not and probable won't be (for a veeeeeeeery long time) anything but a minority.

[Jeremy K. @ Apr 25th 2008 6:22PM]

I highly doubt this is real. Can you believe that a VP of Content Relations would write "Its run out of steam" ?

[Amol @ Apr 25th 2008 6:25PM]

"Oh my god they killed Intel"
"Those bastards!"

*/me gets shot and low ranked*

[Chris @ Apr 25th 2008 6:27PM]

Why don't they just laught at their actual competitor, ATI/AMD or are they not even considered competiton.

[Conor Maher @ Apr 25th 2008 6:28PM]

Lower prices plx! :D

[Ted @ Apr 25th 2008 6:30PM]

So nvidia and intel are competing directly. This is good news. Bad news for AMD though, as it seems to me that fierce competition between Intel and Nvidia could possibly muscle them out of the spotlight permanently. Good news for people who have been craving the next leap in graphics performance though, looks like things are going to speed up again after the relative stagnation of the past year or so :)

[mabhatter @ Apr 26th 2008 6:03PM]

Intel is trying to pawn off 2003 graphics as "extreme" and trying to sell OEMs on really fast processors to make up for poor graphics subsystem performance (not unlike the integrated audio/winmodems we had years ago). Intel sees Nvidia/ATI making a nice $25 per PC cost and wants to muscle in on getting that money for itself from OEMS. ATI folded to AMD for just that reason. The majority of their profits were from cheap desktop GPUs and intel wiped them out overnight (remember nearly all laptops used to have ATI rage or radeons in them?)
Now intel is trying to steal away software developers from using GPUs to some mythical new "super-multi-core" tech they have planned (which will only work half as good as a GPU for the first 3 years) and that will kill Nvidia and PC gaming when nobody can have computers that run modern games (macbook we're looking at you!)

[James Cameron @ Apr 25th 2008 6:39PM]

Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk.

Nvidia been nothing so far but talking.

[lawschoolbound @ Apr 25th 2008 6:47PM]

It seems to me that with all the talk about integrated systems that can do both general processing and graphics work that AMD/ATI should be in a great position to release an integrated cheap platform that could at least perform on par with nVidia's solution.

[torqueo @ Apr 25th 2008 6:50PM]

Silly NVIDIA. Maybe they're jealous because Intel's X3100 and other integrated GPU's has taken some of their business? (fantastic GPU's for business type laptops and workstations).

Intel is either laughing or completely oblivious on account of NVIDIA not even showing up as a blip on their radar.

[Jouten @ Apr 25th 2008 7:02PM]

This will be good. More competition means more benefits to the consumer and better quality products (hopefully) competing for our hard earned cash.

I would still like to see them in a 'Hell in a Cell' match. My money will go where it's treated best and quality to boot though.

[zargon @ Apr 25th 2008 7:05PM]

Nerd fight!

I don't see either the CPU or GPU going away. Though, I wouldn't mind seeing discrete GPU's that need their own power plant, going away.

[EQC @ Apr 25th 2008 8:26PM]

to zargon: I'll agree with you on that. Every generation, high-end GPUs consume more and more power and come on bigger and bigger cards -- the high-end cards now are often longer than a motherboard is wide, and take up two slots. And, did I mention that you may need two of them? Meanwhile, for the last 6 years or so, CPUs have been basically fitting into the same power/space envelope, and stock CPU heatsink/fans haven't changed much. Power/Heat on a mid-range CPU has actually gone down in the last couple years...

NVidia's has a certain amount of validity in saying that the GPU is pretty important -- it matters way more than the CPU for gaming and decoding HD video. Even Vista now basically requires a reasonalbe graphics chip (although a decent integrated chip will do fine there).

On the other hand...I'm pretty sure that *most* people aren't gamers and watch most of their movies on a TV... and all the rest of the computer tasks you might be interested in rely on the CPU (and ram and hard drive...) to be nice and speedy. Nowadays, our computers are bogged down with firewalls, antivirus, anti-spyware, etc...if you don't want to notice a slowdown, you need a good CPU, and the GPU's aren't doing anything to take care of that constant workload

[ishism @ Apr 25th 2008 7:07PM]

I just ordered an Dell Laptop, with Intel's dual core and Nvidia's 8400 gs. Does this mean, this type of configuration is about to end???
On another note, thems fighting words are sooo fun to watch.

[ethana2 @ Apr 25th 2008 7:20PM]

probably not.
..yeah, they are kinda fun to watch. I want to hear Shuttleworth call Jobs a wuss. That'd be very entertaining.

I'm getting a similar machine too, $800 cash. I'm going to be beyond broke for a while..

[ishism @ Apr 25th 2008 7:41PM]

I'll be broke for a few weeks as well. Can't wait to get it.

[Moo2 @ Apr 25th 2008 7:51PM]

how could a guy with the name of "Shuttleworth" call anyone a wuss?

[Vince @ Apr 25th 2008 9:07PM]

Yeah, and who the heck is Shuttleworth anyhow? He didn't happen to post revenues of $7.51 Billion this quarter too, did he?

[Andy @ Apr 25th 2008 7:08PM]

Hmm, although I like Nvidia cards, this just sounds like posturing by a complete poser.

When Nvidia manage to crack the concept of Dual Core and Quad Core GPU's rather than adding more and more Mhz to their GPU's and memory, and reduce the power output accordingly - then I will sit up and listen. At the moment Nvidia seem to be emulating the Pentium 4 roadmap. Intel realised that it couldn't continue to ramp up the Mhz in these chips. Nvidia need to bite the bullet and revamp their chips in a similar fashion.

[Hammurabi @ Apr 25th 2008 9:33PM]

Apparently it went unnoticed that nvidia has a 128-core processor. Check out the Tesla.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_computing_solutions.html

[ethana2 @ Apr 25th 2008 7:17PM]

Processors are processors. Everything will collide. It will start with the cell broadband engine being used under SPEGL, and it will continue with CUDA and gallium stream co-processing.. and after that, we'll have plentiful quad core machines with the occasional octal core...

Make no mistake. In ten years, that's one market, not two.

[Zorque @ Apr 26th 2008 5:04AM]

The Cell is really poor for performing a large share of regular computing tasks and is best suited for render and/or server farms, not home computers. It's also, from everything I've seen, inordinately expensive and has a low success rate in being created, but don't let your fanboy cataracts let you see anything based in reality.


P.S. Processors aren't just processors, or else we wouldn't differentiate between floating-point and fixed-point, x64, x86, PPC, SPARC, etc. Eventually we'll reach a point where software emulation of video hardware can be done on the CPU, but there's a difference between that and native CPU video support.

[Mam00th @ Apr 25th 2008 7:20PM]

And as always, where's AMD?

[Jay @ Apr 25th 2008 6:30PM]

As much as I stay awake at night dreaming they'll fly in on a golden unicorn and smiteth intel with a sword covered in diamonds...I think the reality is slowing turning into my eventual nightmare of my turion being zapped by darkcmagic, causing it to overheat be millions of degrees and blow up in me face

[fischju @ Apr 25th 2008 6:32PM]

The 4800 should come out next month, and should rock the 9800's socks off.