'May you live in interesting times' goes the old Chinese curse...
So Nvidia refuses to license it's SLI to Intel, now Intel refuses to license it's newest reference design to Nvidia. Sounds like two children in a playground arguing over sandboxes...
I really see no winners here, just losers of varying degrees, with we consumers losing the most of all.
Maybe Intel should have bought up ATI, they certainly could have weathered the capitol hit better than AMD, and they would then be in a much better position ti have a war with Nvidia.
As to Nvidia buying AMD? Fat chance. US won't let the technology ownership go overseas, and if by some fluke they did allow the xfer of technology, Intel would rescind it's x86 license.
IBM could buy AMD and ATI lock stock and barrel, and not even have to go very far into their cash reserves... But they won't. They have spent the last eight years or so restructuring into a services business for the most part, except for the very high end mainframe / clustered CPU businesses.
So to quote (Bob) Dylan, "the times they are a changin". Remains to be seen if the times will get better or worse.