You know, the story I wrote about Nvidia last week has got me thinking. The company’s latest marketing campaign centres on the fact that you don’t need to buy an expensive quad-core CPU.

Instead, it advises you to get hold of a reasonable dual-core processor and team it with a well-specced graphics card which will give you more bang for your buck. That’s a reasonable argument. But it rather hides something more; is it that Nvidia is actually running scared? It’s certainly the latest salvo in an ongoing tête-à-tête between Intel and Nvidia over the last few weeks.

Despite Nvidia’s strength in the graphics market, it doesn’t have something that its competitors do – a plan for when PC processing and graphics become as indelibly entwined as sea and sand (unless, of course, it really is buying VIA). On the other hand, Intel has its forthcoming Larrabee discrete chip. AMD has the GPU-CPU Fusion processor tech in the pipeline. Intel also plans to put graphics processing directly onto the die of the next-generation Nehalem architecture.

Long-term game

And while we won’t see the fruits of these labours until the end of 2009 at the earliest, the situation is an awkward one for Nvidia. Its only real competitor, ATI, has been snapped up, and although the short-term has been difficult for the new AMD, longer-term things could be a whole lot rosier.

While Nvidia has respect for Intel as a microprocessor manufacturer that works alongside its products, its representatives clearly have little time for the company’s graphical capabilities, especially in terms of the integrated market, which is where Nvidia really wants to make up ground.

Earlier this month Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said Intel’s integrated graphics were "a joke", before saying that even if they were 10 times as powerful, they would only just match Nvidia’s offerings. He aided his illustration by telling analysts that Nvdia would be opening "a can of whoop ass" on Intel.

Very bullish indeed. Intel was quick to respond with comment about Nvidia’s Vista driver tardiness. But while Intel can probably afford to annoy Nvidia, can the same be said the other way around – especially with Larrabee on the horizon.

Intel goes it alone

Intel clearly has its sights set on a future without Nvidia. At the Intel Developer Forum at the beginning of the month, Intel senior vice president Pat Gelsinger spelled out the death of PC graphics as we know it. "First, graphics that we have all come to know and love today, I have news for you. It's coming to an end.

"Our multi-decade old 3D graphics rendering architecture that's based on a rasterisation approach is no longer scalable and suitable for the demands of the future," said Gelsinger.

That much is clear. But both Intel and Nvidia have carried on bickering. Both have released counter-claims regarding the abilities of Intel’s integrated offerings, and Nvidia’s latest ‘forget quad-core’ campaign seems in direct response to IDF claims that buying more powerful GPUs at the cost of CPU grunt doesn’t make sense.

The real winner out of all this could, intriguingly, be AMD. Although it has fallen behind in recent times, the company is currently the only organisation with comprehensive CPU and GPU know-how. And that could be invaluable in the ever more integrated, system-on-a-chip world of the future.