Nanotech - The Circuits Blog

Despite persistent rumors, Nvidia's chief executive says the graphics chip supplier is not working on an Intel-compatible chip.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang

(Credit: Nvidia)

In an exclusive interview with CNET Thursday, I asked CEO Jen-Hsun Huang about the possibility of Nvidia coming up with its own x86 (Intel-compatible) chip technology, after the company reported strong third-quarter earnings. A recurring rumor has it that Nvidia is developing a chip that would be able to run the same software that runs on all Intel- and AMD-based PCs worldwide.

"No," he said when asked if there was any truth to the rumor. "Nvidia's strategy is very, very clear. I'm very straightforward about it. Right now, more than ever, we have to focus on visual and parallel computing."

Huang went on to describe where the chip supplier sees its best opportunities for growth. "Our strategy is to proliferate the GPU (graphics processing unit) into all kinds of platforms for growth," he said. "GPUs in servers for parallel computing, for supercomputing--and cloud computing with our GPU is a fabulous growth opportunity--and streaming video."

"And also getting our GPUs into the lowest power platforms we can imagine and driving mobile computing with it," Huang added, referring to its Tegra chip, which, for example, powers Microsoft's Zune HD media player.

Despite Huang's denials, Doug Freedman of Broadpoint AmTech is the latest to postulate that Nvidia will enter the x86 central processing unit market. "We feel Nvidia could become a supplier of x86 CPUs by necessity, perhaps in the next 12 months (if not sooner) to preserve both GPU and chipset revenue," Freedman said in a note recently.

"We believe the company has hired former Transmeta staff extensively," Freedman said. Transmeta was at one time a low-power x86-compatible chip supplier. Earlier this year, Intellectual Ventures acquired the patent portfolio of Transmeta.

Huang also dismissed the the possibility of Nvidia using Globalfoundries as a manufacturing partner--typically referred to as a "foundry" or a "fab"--for its chips, after saying in the earnings conference call that Nvidia's longstanding foundry partner--Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)--was not allocating it enough capacity.

"Globalfoundries is an AMD fab, right?" he said. "Globalfoundries is AMD's fab. Our strategy is TSMC."

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang seemed unsurprised by allegations made Wednesday by New York's attorney general that Intel has illegally tried to maintain its monopoly.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

(Credit: Nvidia)

"Where there's smoke there's probably fire. It blows my mind that's it's taken this long," Huang said in an interview Thursday, just after the graphics chipmaker posted solid fourth-quarter earnings. Nvidia competes with Intel in the PC graphics chip market.

"Even bribes and kickbacks can't stop somebody from buying our graphics processors," he said, referring to the allegations made in the lawsuit.

When contacted, Intel had no comment.

"Tactics good for AMD are tactics good for Nvidia," he added. "We have far superior products to Intel, that's how we survive by innovating far ahead of (Intel)."

Nvidia is locked in a legal battle with Intel, preventing Nvidia from making chipsets for Intel's "Nehalem" Core i series of chips--the lastest and greatest line of processors from Intel. Nvidia's Ion chipset--used in Apple MacBooks and Hewlett-Packard Netbooks, for example--has been very successful.

Huang also commented on the wave of next-generation tablets and media pads expected to hit the market next year, such as the rumored Apple tablet. Nvidia is already working with device makers who will use its Tegra chip in these designs next year.

"I think that's going to be the next big form factor," he said. "More and more people that use the iPhone would like to have a bigger iPhone. And the fact that 4g is coming--20 megabits per second. What can't you do. I think this (market) space is about to go nuts," he said.

"I really think we're on the cusp of our second personal computer revolution," he said.

Nvidia on Wednesday named the chairman of Stanford University's computer science department as its new chief scientist, a particularly important position for the world's largest graphics chip supplier as it wages a technological war with Intel.

Bill Dally, Nvidia's new chief scientist, will replace legendary scientist David Kirk.

(Credit: Stanford University)

Bill Dally, who will be vice president of Nvidia Research, has been a professor of computer science at Stanford since 1997 and chairman of the computer science department since 2005. He will replace David Kirk, a renowned scientist in his own right, who will become an Nvidia fellow.

"Bill is legendary in the computer industry," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of Nvidia, in response to an e-mail query Wednesday. "He has made fundamental contributions, from parallel computing architectures to interconnects to low power designs to super fast I/Os" Huang said. "I expect him to contribute at all of those levels and more. And he will take forward David's work of building Nvidia research into one of the most regarded labs in the world."

Nvidia will need all the technological brain power it can muster in the coming years as Intel focuses its formidable resources on graphics technology like its upcoming Larrabee graphics chip. Nvidia has also faced increasingly pesky competition from Advanced Micro Devices' ATI graphics unit.

Like Nvidia, Intel is looking to designs that use increasingly sophisticated parallelism--large numbers of processors arrayed to do many tasks simultaneously. In fact, that's exactly what Larabee aspires to do. And Intel has been touting an experimental 80-core chip for a couple of years. Intel has also hooked up with DreamWorks to create animation using rendering farms that employ thousands of processors. Two Super Bowl commercials on Sunday will show off the fruits of this effort.

At Stanford, Dally and his team developed the technology that is found in many large parallel computers today, according to an Nvidia statement. At Caltech, he designed the MOSSIM Simulation Engine and the Torus Routing chip which pioneered "wormhole" routing and virtual-channel flow control. His group at MIT built the J-Machine and the M-Machine, experimental parallel computer systems.

Dally is a co-founder of Velio Communications and Stream Processors. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and also a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM and has received the IEEE Seymour Cray Award and the ACM Maurice Wilkes award. He has published over 200 papers, holds over 50 issued patents, and is an author of the textbooks Digital Systems Engineering and Principles and Practices of Interconnection Networks.

"Nvidia has always been on the hunt for top talent, and this is just another indication of that philosophy," said Jon Peddie, principal at Jon Peddie Research, which tracks the graphics chip industry. "The problem the U.S. and maybe the world face is that the computer industry is building millions of massively parallel processing chips in the CPUs and GPUs and almost no schools are teaching parallel processing programming," he said. "Either we get that changed ASAP or there's going to be a lot of cores sitting around twiddling their silicon thumbs." (CPU stands for central processing unit; GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)

(See Bill Dally's Stanford Web page here. "Current projects" are listed as "ELM: The Efficient Low-Power Microprocessor; On-chip Interconnection Networks; Sequoia: Programming the Memory Hierarchy; Scalable Network Fabrics.")

David Kirk has been with Nvidia since January 1997. He led Nvidia's graphics technology development for today's most popular consumer entertainment platforms. Kirk is the inventor of 50 patents and patent applications relating to graphics design and holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the California Institute of Technology.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Nvidia is making a case for the graphics processing unit, the other chip inside the PC, at the Nvision conference that opened on Monday.

In his inaugural keynote--this is first Nvision conference--Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang reminded the audience that the graphics processing unit (GPU) has come a long way. In short, the GPU has evolved from the simple fixed-function graphics accelerator (e.g., the IBM 8514 that debuted in 1987) to the modern graphics chip, a computing engine capable of almost one teraflop of processing power. (A teraflop is equal to one trillion floating point operations per second.)

Huang, responding to an email query, made it clear that the GPU is complementary to the CPU, or Central Processing Unit. "It is not about replacing the CPU at all," he said. "We don't believe that replacing the CPU is a good strategy. Supplementing the CPU is far better." Intel is the world's largest supplier of CPUs.

In the keynote, Huang cited Stanford University's Folding@home program, a distributed computing project that uses about 2.6 million PCs--for a total of 288 teraflops of computing power--to study protein folding and misfolding. This is expected to deepen researchers' understanding of diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer.

Nvidia has released a version of the Folding@home program based on its CUDA development environment using more than 24,000 GPUs. Though this number represents less than 1 percent of the total processors in the Folding@home project, it provides 1.4 petaflops of performance, or nearly five times the processing power of all the CPUs in use by Folding@home. The researchers at Stanford hope that GPUs will significantly accelerate the time to discovery for the cures for many diseases.

Following this, Peter Stevenson of Realtime Technologies (RTT) gave a demo of real-time ray tracing used in auto design, in this case demonstrating a digital prototype of a new Lamborghini model. Ray tracing has been mentioned frequently by Intel over the last six months as a technique it would possibly use in the future. PC graphics technology today uses rasterization to generate images. (A discussion of ray tracing vs. rasterization here.)

Ray tracing can render three-dimensional graphics with extremely complex light interactions, allowing the creation of transparent surfaces and shadows, for example, with stunning photorealistic results.

This demonstration was followed by Joshua Edwards of Microsoft Live Labs. He gave a demo of Photosynth, which is based on the research of Noah Snavely and Steve Seitz at the University of Washington and Richard Szeliski of Microsoft Research. Photosynth uses dozens or hundreds photos of a place to reconstruct a 3D model and then displays a 360-degree perspective of the location.

Edwards showed how a series of photographs can be combined to create an interactive view of Stonehenge and the National Archive building.

Later, Huang showcased a technology getting a lot of buzz--3D stereoscopic graphics. (At the Intel Developer Forum last week, Intel announced a deal with DreamWorks Animation to enhance 3D cinema and bring 3D to TVs and other devices, which the two companies branded Intru3D.) The 3D stereoscopic demo showed 3D stereo clips from Nvidia's Medusa demo and Age of Empires.

Next up was Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel. (Han's touch screen technology has been featured as the "Magic Wall" on CNN's Election Center coverage.) Han demonstrated his company's multitouch user interface technology using a 100-inch multitouch display, giving the audience a taste of what the UI of the future could become. Han said the current bottleneck to multi-user computing are antiquated input devices like the mouse. Han and Huang were able to simultaneously interact with one display, moving things around the screen and calling up objects with simple hand motions.

Initial applications are limited to military and high-end design, but the technology will trickle down into enterprise and home computing. (Microsoft Surface is an analogous example of this type of user interface.)

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said he has no interest in buying out chip supplier Via Technologies, dispelling rumors--at least for now--that had been circulating back in March.

Nvidia, Via--not going to happen (for now)

"They don't need our money. I don't need theirs," Huang said, referring to Via. "They're doing fine. People want to create drama," he added.

Previous reports cited a number of scenarios including Nvidia's acquisition of the entire company. Via makes processors and chipsets for x86-based computers. Via reported revenue of about US$87.5 million in the first quarter of 2008.

The company competes with Intel and Advanced Micro Devices for processor sockets inside low-cost PCs. Recently, Hewlett-Packard selected Via's C7 procesor for the HP 2231 Mini-Note PC.

Rumors were fueled some more when Nvidia said it was teaming up with Via to build a low-cost PC platform to compete with Intel. The two companies touted the design last month as "the world's most affordable Vista Premium PC" that will combine Via's upcoming Isaiah processor with an integrated Nvidia graphics chipset.

But Huang clarified why he isn't interested in buying out any general-purpose processor makers. "Our shtick is that we just focus on one thing. We said we're a visual computing technology company and we're completely focused on this."

"Wherever their processor capabilities intersect with our visual computing focus, we will support them. We support ARM, we support Power PC in the game console world, we support Hitachi SH in the automobile industry, we support Via in low-end PCs," he said.

But he did paint a scenario where alternatives may be considered. "The reason why we don't do that is because I happen to believe visual computing is still innovating very quickly. Now, if it turns out that things don't change anymore. If peanut butter and bread--neither of which are innovating anymore. Then they ought to put it together. Peanut butter and bread, mix it right into the dough."

Jen-Hsun Huang doesn't pull any punches. And Intel is a favorite punching bag these days.

I had a chance to sit down with the Nvidia CEO as he described his company's philosophy and what sounds like the first volleys of a long battle with Intel.

Nvidia CEO and founder Jen-Hsun Huang

(Credit: Nvidia)

A quick backdrop: Nvidia is the largest graphics chip company in the world, with quarterly revenue in the $1 billion range. Although Intel and Nvidia seem to exist in symbiotic bliss inside many PCs, this doesn't reflect the two companies' business models, which are in many respects far apart.

Intel is a chip manufacturer. Nvidia is not; it's a fabless company. Intel supplies the central-processing unit (CPU), a general-purpose processor. Nvidia supplies the graphics-processing unit (GPU), a special-purpose chip.

Huang is relentless in driving GPU performance--and fearless when challenging Intel. This is admirable, if anything. Even the world's largest PC makers treat Intel with great deference--publicly--because the chipmaker is so instrumental in supplying and defining the core electronics in their PCs (And partly due to the fact that they use Intel advertising dollars).

But Huang will tear into Intel when he thinks it's warranted. And Intel may have reason to be worried about the content of Huang's candor. Despite Intel's colossal size and and clout, Nvidia--not Intel--supplies the defining chip for the most savvy computer users: game enthusiasts. They depend on Nvidia graphics chips to deliver the spectacular visuals of games like Crysis.

And few people will deny that computing is becoming more visual. The GPU is essentially a parallel-computing engine that is extremely efficient at running visual (and scientific) software--that is, many of the popular graphics, video, and photo applications now running on PCs.

Nvidia is set to challenge Intel in the mobile Internet device space. It is getting set to make a big platform play in tiny, fit-in-your-pocket devices with its APX 2500. This "system on a chip" will house everything that comes on a PC circuit board today. Intel is targeting the same market with its Moorestown processor, due in late 2009 or 2010.

One important note: because Huang had made so many references to Intel over the last few months, particularly at the financial-analyst day in April, the interview revolved around this topic. In some cases, I asked pointed questions about Intel and posed hypothetical--i.e. devil's advocate--scenarios. In other cases, Huang volunteered statements about Intel.

Huang has spoken forthrightly in the last few months about Intel. The obvious question is why.

"People thought that I had lost some of my patience with Intel recently. The fact of the matter is that they're out spouting things that are just not true. And I was just correcting that," he said.

"Intel is a big, powerful company," I noted to Huang. "And there aren't many people like you in the industry, who are so blunt about Intel."

His reaction: "Because they are Intel. Because they are a monopoly. Because they are a market-dominant player. They ought to be held to a higher standard. They shouldn't be able to say that other peoples' businesses are going to die."

Huang, here, is referring to a statement by an Intel executive who recently said current graphics technology (sometimes referred to generally as rasterization) will be replaced by another kind of graphics technology (sometimes referred to as ray tracing), on which Intel is working.

Intel has also been dropping more hints about its upcoming high-end graphics chip, called Larrabee, with relatively few specifics. I asked Huang if he thought there was a reason so few details had been given.

"Larabee is a PowerPoint slide," Huang said. "I haven't met a product on my PowerPoint slide that I don't like. You know, they're floating Larrabee out there just to put a shadow over us, cast a cloud over us. They've already slipped it two years from the time they talked about. They would love to slip it another four years and leave a cloud over me."

"Just to play devil's advocate," I said, "Intel sees the success of the GPU. So it has to crank up its skunk works and develop a fast GPU too (Larrabee). Then Intel, being Intel, has to fill its factories and sell these things. Again, I'm playing devil's advocate here."

Huang's immediate reaction: "You and I have a deal. If you're going to write controversial stuff about what I say, can you write what you just said? Here's what I believe: I believe that the entire world believes that what Intel does is build a factory, stuff that people don't want to buy, and then shoves it down its customer's throats. Just like you said."

Huang also spoke about how the PC industry is shifting away from the CPU-centric vision.

"We would love it if people would buy more GPUs, but the fact of the matter is, we don't have Intel's budget to tell you to buy something you don't need. We're going to let the market decide for itself," he said.

"Selecting the right GPU for the right CPU--and having these two processors collaborate. We call it the optimized PC design," he continued. "Notice, we didn't call it 'increase your GPU' design. Notice we didn't go 'buy more quad cores.' It's not a market benefit message. The optimized PC asks what your work flow is. Take the work flow, and benchmark it on the machine. And decide for yourself."

Huang had a few points to make about changes in PC marketing.

"The whole idea that the PC industry is good, better, best, faster microprocessors, more memory--that psychology of the PC industry is so yesterday," he said. "Not a single person believes it. Sony doesn't believe it. Dell doesn't believe it. HP doesn't believe it. God knows Apple doesn't believe it. Nobody believes it anymore."

Huang elaborated, saying that at the other end of the computing spectrum is the minimalist PC, which Nvidia's APX 2500 system-on-a-chip addresses.

"There's a movement toward 'I want the most minimal of PCs': the ThinkPad (X300)," Huang said. "In the future, if it's not thin like a sheet of paper, it's just too much. There should be no electronics. There should be just one tiny chip. And this computer ought to cost nothing. The display should be the most expensive thing. It's not about the CPU. It's not about the GPU. It's about the computer on the chip."

But Intel, and its capacity to integrate more and more of the PC's function into its chipsets, is never far from his mind. Huang gave a number of examples of companies--as smaller and smaller chip geometries have allowed more and more transistors to be packed into a single chip--that disappeared because they were integrated out of existence. (Think sound chip and multimedia chip companies as just a few examples.)

"Make me...list one single example where Moore's Law is not your enemy today," he said. "At this very moment, the only one we know of is the GPU."

Every year, Huang said, "we're making chips that are twice as big as the (year) before that. And every single year, we deliver an experience that is twice as good as the year before. And every single year, people say, 'It's not good enough. I want more. I want more.'"

Throughout it all, Moore's Law is still Huang's friend, he said.

"Notice in the case of CPUs, people are saying, 'I don't need that many gigahertz,' or 'I don't need that many cores,'" Huang noted. "(CPU makers) are going down that path. And that's why it's possible now to build an Atom CPU. At that point, the technology becomes good enough."

Huang said he is not trying to wish Intel away. He is willing to co-exist. But he doesn't believe that Intel is able to do this. This probably is his biggest beef.

"There are going to be two important processors in the system," he said. "A microprocessor that is used for all kinds of complicated, unpredictable sequential code. And a parallel processor, called a GPU, that is really dedicated toward doing very parallel, very heavy-lifting mathematical operations."

Huang refocused his attention on Intel.

"Intel cannot share the world with someone else. They want the world to have one processor. They don't want the world to have two processors, even if it's good for them. (The Nvidia chip) just happens to be so famous, and just happens to be so popular, and happens to be so delightful that it just really makes them upset. That's an anti-innovation feeling. That's a monopolistic feeling, right? You can't share the world with somebody else."

His attitude borders on paranoid. But in Silicon Valley, the credo "only the paranoid survive," put forth by former Intel CEO Andrew Grove, is followed by many.

"People have been predicting the demise of our company for 10 years now," Huang said. "Intel has been in the graphics business for 10 years. They've been predicting our death for 10 years. They'll be predicting our death 10 years from now."

Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang's jeremiad against Intel heralds future melees with the chip giant over computer graphics technology. Behind the sound and fury lurks Moore's Law.

Most observers agree that the graphics processing unit (GPU) is gaining on the central processing unit (CPU) as the single most important piece of silicon inside the PC. "When you start looking at a PC today, the (central) processor means less and less," according to Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat. The GPU is simply becoming a better way for PC makers to differentiate in a landscape dominated by Intel CPUs, he said.

The question is, who is going to be the largest provider of that differentiation and what form will it take? The pressure on Nvidia--expressed by Huang on Thursday at an analyst meeting--is understandable, as the company seeks to fend off both Intel and AMD, who are increasingly focused on graphics, said McGregor. "Nvidia faces serious challenges. One of their big customers (AMD) went out and acquired a competitor (ATI) and then (you have) Intel saying we're going into your territory." That has put Nvidia on edge. Intel, not surprisingly, is the biggest threat.

"Intel is going to be as competitive as they can possibly be," said Dean McCarron, founder and principal of Mercury Research. "There is a pretty different vision between what Nvidia has and what Intel has about the future of the market. You seem to see a lot of pressure on some kind of integrated solution (from Intel). That is not compatible with a standalone graphics market, where Nvidia is the largest player."

Nvidia is teaming up with Via to build a low-cost PC platform to compete with Intel.

(Credit: Nvidia)

Huang sees his company doing battle not only with Intel but with a guiding principle put forward by one of the company's founders, Gordon Moore--that the number of transistors on a microprocessor would double every two years--as Intel continues to integrate more graphics silicon into its chipsets. "We can get integrated into anything. Integrated into a (chipset's) south bridge. If you're not good enough, then Moore's law is your enemy. Moore's law will stick you in some random chip. We get integrated into a speck of dust," Huang said at the meeting. Here he was saying that if Nvidia doesn't stay well ahead of Intel--where it is now--the CPU giant will simply integrate the graphics technology into its own silicon and Nvidia will become irrelevant.

Huang is confident his company can maintain its lead. "GPU technology is far, far ahead of integrated graphics," he said. "We can innovate our way forward. The world already has computing companies that make processors for everybody. I'm supposed to add the secret ingredient that differentiates it for the few. Now the few that I'm talking about happens to be hundreds of millions of people. I'm OK with that."

Intel sees a future where it is a bigger graphics player at the high end of the market. At the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai earlier this month, Senior Intel VP Patrick Gelsinger spelled out Intel's vision: ray tracing-based rendering technologies that can be used in high-end gaming, an Nvidia stronghold. "An intro of these capabilities into mainstream gaming we believe is possible in the future," Gelsinger said. Another prong of Intel's strategy is to offer a graphics platform, code-named Larrabee, based on the long-standing x86 instruction set.

(More background from CNET on ray tracing here: "CPU: The future of GPU?" and a discussion of ray tracing vs. rasterization here.)

Referring to a question from the audience about Intel's Larrabee chip at the analyst meeting on Thursday, Huang responded: "The question from the gentleman is we haven't really talked about Larrabee and is he opening up a can of worms. Well, we're going to open up a can of whoop-ass in a little bit," Huang said, referring to future technology that Nvidia is working on.

Bravado aside, to effectively do battle with a circa-2009 Intel that excels in both central and graphics processing and AMD-ATI, Nvidia must seek new partners. It is turning to one of the only other--aside from Intel and AMD--x86 processor suppliers to build an alternative PC platform. Billed as "The World's Most Affordable Vista Premium PC," the sub-$45 processing platform will combine Via's Isaiah processor with an integrated Nvidia graphics chipset.

"Supporting Via's new CPU is not a big leap for them. And, it's a fantastic vote of confidence for Via because Nvidia wouldn't commit the engineering talent to it if Nvidia didn't believe the processor had a big opportunity," according to Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research.

Nvidia says about 73 million Intel integrated graphics chips go unused.

(Credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia, as it prepares for a long, grueling fight with Intel, got some solace on Friday from a report issued by Doug Freedman of American Technology Research itemizing why Nvidia may be in a better position than casual observers believe. These include:

• Nvidia remains the No. 1 graphics supplier as up to 73 million Intel integrated Graphics Processors (IGPs) are unused in systems due to "double-attach" with a Nvidia solution. (Note: Market share calculations from researchers such as Mercury Research and Jon Peddie Research show Intel as the No. 1 graphics supplier--ed.)

• Intel projects strong performance gains in IGP roadmap (10x performance in 2010), but from a very low performance base. 66 percent of top selling games fail or have issues in current IGP solutions.

• Intel multicores do not handle tasks better than discrete GPUs, but they are complementary in a heterogeneous computing environment.

• Integration of IGP with CPU does not present a threat, but may increase double-attach (adding a graphics card to a system with an existing integrated graphics chip) opportunities for Nvidia as it continues to add differentiated features for the few high-end graphics, gamer customers.

Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang let rip with a diatribe against Intel at Nvidia's financial analyst day on Thursday. Huang cited frustration with recent Intel comments stating that discrete graphics cards will become "unnecessary."

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang

(Credit: Nvidia)

Because Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, includes integrated-graphics silicon in most of its chipsets the company has become the world's largest supplier of graphics chips. Its upcoming Nehalem processors will move the graphics from the chipset onto the same piece of silicon as the main processor. A design that is expected to result in vastly better performance.

(Note: A contrarian take on the graphics market states that Nvidia remains the #1 graphics supplier because approximately 73 million Intel integrated graphics processors (IGP) are unused in systems due to "double-attach" with an Nvidia solution, according to Doug Freedman of American Technology Research. More here at ExtremeTech.)

This image of Intel as an unstoppable graphics juggernaut is what Huang takes issue with. What set him off initially was a comment from an Intel graphics and gaming technologist who said that consumers "probably won't need" discrete cards in the future. Nvidia's primary business is designing and supplying graphics chips for discrete graphics cards that go into PCs.

"We don't typically like to do this. It's just that we've been taking it and taking it and taking it. Every single frickin' day. Are you allowed to say that word? Every day all over the world. Enough is enough."

Huang was especially upset about Intel's claims of boosting integrated graphics performance in the future, saying Intel's claims paled against what Nvidia will achieve by that time.

"Claim after claim after claim. They're just false. They cross the line of fair play," he said. "Here's another one. Nvidia's gonna be dead. Because we're (Intel) sticking the graphics in the CPU and (Nvidia) will have no place to stick it," he said.

Huang also attacked Intel's marketing machine. "Just because they have this enormous marketing budget. Just because they have platforms everywhere in the world. It doesn't make it right. To take on smaller companies. It's just not right."

Huang also mounted an aggressive defense of gaming on the PC--one of the main reasons many consumers opt for Nvidia graphics chips. He began by claiming that Intel graphics can't run games. "We're not the only ones saying this. This is Tim Sweeney. One of the most important game developers in the entire world. 'Intel is incapable of running modern games. Intel's integrated graphics just don't work. I don't think they will ever work.' This wasn't said in 1994. This was said on March 10, 2008," Huang said.

"(It's) one of the most important apps. I play games. A lot more people play games today than before. It's a big industry. We happen to think games are important. Game developers are important. Game players are important. Online games, important. Retail games, important. First person shooters, important. Simulation games, important. I'm a perfectly grown adult. I'm not ashamed of them."

Intel also has plans to bring out a graphics engine code-named Larrabee that uses "many cores" to take on high-end engineering and scientific applications. And presumably games too.

When asked to comment, Intel spokesman Dan Snyder said, "Are you surprised? Nvidia's CEO has been very vocal about their feelings for several months now, so I don't think any of this comes as a surprise."