NVIDIA Analyst Day: Jen-sun Goes to the Mat With Intel

The Tenderloin and the Two Buck Chuck

As for the idea of Intel integrating a GPU onto their CPUs, NVIDIA painted a rather distasteful picture of mixing together something excellent with something incredibly sub par. The first analogy Jen-sun pulled out was one of someone's kid topping off a decanted bottle of '63 Chateau Latour with an '07 Robert Mondavi. The idea of Intel combining their very well engineered CPUs with their barely passable integrated graphics is an aberration to be avoided at all costs.

This isn't to say that CPUs and GPUs shouldn't work together, but that Intel should stick to what they know. In fact, NVIDIA heavily pushed the idea of heterogeneous computing but decried the idea that taking a system block diagram and drawing a box around the CPU and GPU would actually do anything useful. NVIDIA definitely wants their hardware to be the manycore floating point compute hardware paired with Intel's multicore general purpose processors, and they try to paint a picture of a world where both are critical to any given system.

Certainly CPUs and GPUs are currently needed and unless Intel can really pull out some magic that won't change for the foreseeable future. NVIDIA made a big deal of relating this pair to Star Trek technology: you need both your impulse engines and your warp drive. Neither is useful for the task the other is designed for: short range navigation can't be done with a warp drive, and impulse engines aren't suitable for long distance travel requiring faster than light speeds. The bottom line is that hardware should be designed and used for the task that best suits it.

Again, this says nothing about what happens if Intel brings to market a competitive manycore floating point solution. Maybe the hardware they design will be up to the task, and maybe it won't. But Jen-sun really wanted to get across the idea that the current incarnation of the CPU and the current incarnation of Intel's GPU technology are nowhere near sufficient to handle anything like what NVIDIA's hardware enables.

Coming back the argument that it's best to stick with what you know, Jen-sun stated his belief that "you can't be a great company by doing everything for everybody;" that Intel hardware works fine for running operating systems and for applications where visualization is not a factor at all: what NVIDIA calls Enterprise Computing (in contrast to Visual Computing). Going further, he postulates that "the best way for Google to compete against Microsoft is not to build another operating system."

Making another back handed comment about Intel, Jen-sun later defended their recent loss in market share for low end notebook graphics. He held that the market just wasn't worth competing in for them and that other companies offered solutions that fit the market better. Defending NVIDIA's lack of competition in this market segment, he doesn't say to himself: "Jen-sun, when you wake up in the morning, go steal somebody else's business," but rather "we wake up in the morning saying, 'ya know, we could change the world.'"