Nvidia on Intel: "We're going to open a can of whoop ass"

On Thursday, April 10th 2008 at 11:29 PM

By Andrew Pociu (View Profile)

Intel has recently shown interest in entering the graphics market with more performant GPUs that are designed to compete against the ones from Nvidia and ATI. As of now, Intel has a wide distribution of integrated graphics but none performant enough to compete with the two big players on this market.

The news that Intel has interest in entering this market were harshly commented by Jen-Hsun Huang - the CEO of Nvidia - who said "we're going to open a can of whoop ass" on Intel, when asked by analysts about the chipmaker's new plans. He also characterized Intel's GPU efforts as "a joke", and said that while they might be good enough for running Microsoft Office, even if Intel improves their performance tenfold in the next two years, they'd still be way behind Nvidia's products.

The head of Nvidia was set off by a comment from a technologist that implied there will no longer be a need for dedicated graphics cards in the near future, at which Huang responded: "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." Denoting sarcasm, Huang said "Nvidia's gonna be dead. Because we're sticking the graphics in the CPU and (Nvidia) will have no place to stick it" and "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."