intel likes being an excluding company... while AMD is fine with partnerships with other companies that make competing products.

i wonder if this'll push nVidia to being even closer to AMD if intel's really serious about competing against them...

Intel messed up when they said they wouldn't buy ATI products after the acquistion by AMD.

That single statement left Intel zero pricing leverage with Nvidia, the only remaining graphics supplier.

Intel then complained to the feds that there was a lack of competition in the graphics industry!

Now they're going in the biz??? Good luck, Intel, you'll need it!

I wonder if this is less about graphics, and more about nVidia's and AMD's (nee ATI) GPGPU ambitions. Obviously there's going to be more of that going forward in the future, although there's no telling how successful it'll be in the long run. In order ot hedge their bets, it makes sense that Intel would want to have some competency in that space, if only to give them enough background knowledge to keep x86 relevant if that stuff takes off.

On the other hand, if we were to take this at face value, I suppose it's possible that they really made a strategic decision to try again at becoming a player in that space. Given the current circumstances, buying nVidia outright is probably not as attractive a proposition for Intel as it was for AMD to buy ATI.

Intel should just Nvidia, they might spend that much on R&D anyway over a five or six years period.

If Intel sees this through this time 'round, nVidia will be the first domino to fall. Unless Jen-Hsun can come up with the money to pull the manufacturing and process R&D in-house.

It sure isn't gonna be any time soon though.

ATI and NVIDIA have years of experiences that Intel has to catch up if Intel wants to compete competitively.

But then again, it's Intel. They are already capable of producing semiconductors in a nano level and that's something pretty huge to start with.

Things are starting to get really interesting in this industry,

1. Amd can do GPUs now and might bring out a CPU/GPU hybrid chip

2. Intel is taking discrete graphics seriously

3. Nvidia might start making x86 processors

more choice, more competition, yay! (don't burst my bubble)

Intel needs to hire away from the red AND the green team and move them over to the blue team. That way they got brains from both sides working together to come up with something better.

oops, delete post sry

All the best to Intel, but every time they've tried to buy or create any sort of advanced graphics architecture or integrated computing platform, the result -- for a wide range of reasons -- has either been a crib death (Timnah) or a product of only modest performance (Starfighter/i740) that eventually faded away in lower-end products (i810, i845G).

It'll come out 2 years from now and be about as fast as a 9700 Pro.

But the name will be awesome! Extreme! Ultra! Accelerator!