Three-Way Chess, Or All-Out FPS Deathmatch?

This is an extended version of the article I wrote for print this month. It's essentially about the tight love/hate 3 way competition between AMD, Intel, and Nvidia.

Things continue to get even crazier -- Should Nvidia think about buying VIA in order to gain an X86 license? Perhaps they should partner with AMD down the road assuming AMD is able to bring their asset light strategy closer to reality... Will Intel get more aggressive? Will Western Digital get taken out?

Stay tuned, in the coming weeks and months I'll write an even longer list of random thoughts, based on what I believe may happen in the industry. ...and now for the article.

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Nvidia seems to be hitting on all cylinders lately. Although ATI comes close with its latest GPUs, Nvidia has had a very good year so far and seems to be on the winning side of a major battle for a significant portion of the PC platform business. The company has moved beyond building just GPUs and is working to build an ecosystem of multiple Nvidia components, including a masterpiece version of its awesome nForce chipset.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of nForce; just check out the HP Blackbird, which uses an nForce chipset regardless of whether you choose ATI- or Nvidia-based video cards. I like nForce because it’s rock-solid and manages to milk additional performance from PCs in a way that seems to leave Intel and AMD scratching their heads and asking, “How’d they do that?” Of course, this applies strictly to desktops; Intel’s Centrino platform still allows us to deliver the best all-around experience on a notebook.

As impressive as Nvidia’s chipsets have been so far, though, it’s the company’s next big thing that shows it’s not messing around anymore. Nvidia has drawn up a plan to create an integrated graphics chipset and something called “Hybrid SLI,” which on paper looks really tight. Imagine, if you will, a notebook that allows you to handle everyday tasks such as browsing the Web and checking email using a low-voltage graphics processor that also doubles as a northbridge chipset.

The cool thing about Hybrid SLI is it lets you toss in an additional graphics card that in SLI will work in conjunction with the integrated chipset, yielding some pretty compelling 3D performance. If you decide you want to go even further, you can toss in another MXM chip and disable the integrated chipset for maximum enthusiast SLI performance.

What I like best about this idea is it lets the system save power (and, for notebooks, battery life) when using basic 2D apps and then reactivate the discrete GPU or GPUs when you’re playing a game. It also lets us dream up new ways to actively cool a PC via various grades of cooling, depending on what you’re doing. This type of thinking enables companies like ours to create compelling solutions for our customers, and I commend Nvidia for thinking about new ways to deliver a compelling platform with some flexibility.

The interesting thing about all of this is it seems like Nvidia is taking a shot right across Intel’s bow. I think it’s pretty clear that Nvidia wants to grab a share of a very lucrative space that Intel currently owns—the Centrino platform market. Even more interesting is the fact that Nvidia pulled SLI support from Intel (and competing) chipsets. The company is obviously on a mission to be more than a graphics provider, and it’s taking no prisoners. Nothing seems to phase it, except for what happened in the last couple of weeks, perhaps.

Intel bought Havok, a company that both ATI and Nvidia have been touting as the ultimate physics solution. The same company that both ATI and Nvidia have somewhat depended on to deliver more immersive gaming experiences.

That in itself is a statement, wouldn’t you say?

I mean, what other reason would Intel have to acquire Havok? I’m sure there’s more than one, right? Take a minute to list them off and email me, would you?

Whatever Intel’s reasons are, the three-way chess match is about to turn into a multiplayer FPS deathmatch. You’ll soon see other technologies introduced in the “platform” space, and companies that you would least expect will start to toss their hats into the ring.

Solid-state disk tech, for example, is something that we can all see in our crystal ball as the future of mass storage technology. SSDs will allow for faster boot times, smaller form factors, lower power consumption, and ultimately better reliability. The intriguing thing about solid-state is you don’t have to be Seagate, Western Digital, or Hitachi to be an SSD player. You don’t need spinning disks . . .

Very interesting, if I do say so myself, and, um . . . I just did.