A little bit of a tiff has broken out between Intel and Nvidia vis-a-vis the future fo the chip market. Just to get an initial perspective on this consider that Moore’s Law (click here for a detailed explanation) has been shrinking CPU chips for decades – or to be more accurate the chip vendors have been doing so in strict obedience of Moore’s Law. And you may have noticed if you have a habit of opening up your computers that, despite this shrinking tendency, the chips themselves have been getting no smaller. On other words the chip vendors have been putting more on the silicon.

I must be getting old because I can remember the time when there were whole boards for doing nothing more than divide one number into another. Eventually we got down to two CPU chips, one of which, the math co-processor, “did the math”. Eventually that got eaten by the CPU as well. The only thing that didn’t get eaten was the graphics board in the middle of which is a GPU (Graphics processing Unit). And the leader in GPUs is Nvidia.

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Take a look at the above slide which I purloined from an Nvidia presentation and you clearly see that Nvidia believes that in a few years time it will all be about GPUs and, well, the GPU will be the real work-horse. Not for servers of course, but for PCs.

And thus there is a war or words going on between Intel and Nvidia, with Roy Taylor, VP Content Business Developmentof Nvidia declaring that the CPU will soon be pushing up daisies and Intel begging to differ.

In Taylor’s words (purloined from an email): “Basically the CPU is dead. Yes, that processor you see advertised everywhere from Intel. Its run out of steam. The fact is that it no longer makes anything run faster. You don’t need a fast one anymore. This is why AMD is in trouble and its why Intel are panicking. They are panicking so much that they have started attacking us. This is because you do still one chip to get faster and faster – the GPU. That GeForce chip. Yes honestly. No I am not making this up. You are my friends and so I am not selling you. This shit is just interesting as hell.”

This is actually a response to Intel’s adding an integrated graphics system to its chips  – but nothing that could claim to compete with Nvidia’s heavy duty graphics cards. But the truth is that there’s a convergence in progress here and:

• either one of these two companies gets to be the “front half of the pantomime horse”.
• or one of them gets to be the whole of the pantomime horse.

If you are wondering “where does AMD stand in all of this?” It’s a good question. AMD acquired graphics company ATI, wth the probable intention of adding the GPU and CPU together. Now AMD has been having a few bad quarters recently because of a resurgent Intel and it’s probably going to have one or two more, but it looks as though its acquisition of ATI counts as brilliant foresight.

The coming of the GPU, by the way, is yet another disruptive influence on the computer hardware market which is already awash with dsiruptive influences.