Familiar Contempt: Did Nvidia and Intel Ever Really Like Each Other?

Intel has tolerated Nvidia’s products for years, tacitly accepting that the Green Team’s chipsets and GPUs made Intel’s CPUs more attractive to many users, even though it cost Intel in their own chipset sales. This time last year, things weren’t exactly a love-in, but no one had said the other’s product was doomed to occupy less and less of the computing landscape.

The main bone of contention back then was SLI licensing: if you wanted to run multiple Nvidia graphics cards, you needed an Nvidia chipset on your motherboard. Nvidia said Intel wasn’t offering them a fair licensing rate; Intel, unsurprisingly, said Nvidia was asking for too much. In all fairness, it was a question that didn’t affect all that many users, since not that many people run multiple graphics cards.

Then again, for those that do, this SLI/Crossfire schism was important, since this was before ATI released their 48xx series, and ATI graphics had fallen behind Nvidia’s offerings significantly. For a time, the top of the line in graphics required an Nvidia chipset on the motherboard.

In April of last year, Intel and Nvidia exchanged some FUD. Specifically, Intel claimed, with some accuracy, that they ship more graphics processors than anyone else. That’s a big deal: everyone knows Intel is on top in CPUs, but people associate GPUs with Nvidia and AMD/ATI because they are who make discrete graphics. And discrete graphics get the lion’s share of the attention.

People who use integrated graphics may not even know what kind they have. Intel wanted to point out that all those integrated GPUs makes them the number one GPU maker by volume. Nvidia took exception and, referring to a study by an investment firm, pointed out that 73 million of Intel’s GPUs might be out there, but they aren’t being used.

In those cases, the computer has the integrated Intel graphics, but their operation is superseded by a discrete Nvidia card. Factor that in, and Intel sells more GPUs, but Nvidia GPUs are used by more people. So they both say they are number one, and they are both right, but they are measuring different things.

There was no agreeing to disagree, and both sides included a lot of rhetoric to strengthen their position. Actually, they did agree on one thing: that the move to parallel processing means that eventually one type of processor would do most or all of the work in a computer. Of course, Nvidia felt that as things got more parallel and computing becomes more visual, the GPU would win out, while Intel felt that as things got more parallel, CPUs could imitate GPU functionality well enough. Driving this point home is their Larrabee project, which uses a bunch of modified CPUs to act like the many stream processors in a GPU.