Basicly 2 "entities" will win:

1 - Us, the consumers.
2 - AMD.

Its gonna be a hard fight, but i think Intel will back off a bit, or just say it isnt worth it.
History repeats its self alot, and Intel already said several times it was taking over the VGA world.
Intel 740i anyone ?

nVidia got aegia physix, right??

Yes, and intel bought Havoc before them.

Intel > nVidia
Havoc > Aegia

Don't expect the acquisitions to do much in this war, both essentially are turning their respective engines into vector accelerated physics solutions outside their original intent, and sofar neither has offered any compeling reason to care despite years of development and years after product announcements.



To the OP, the main thing is that as big and powerful as nVidia is in graphics to sway the marketplace and developers in it's direction, intel is equally large if not bigger in the entire computer segment.

Also intel is currently making bazillions despite 45nm yield issues, while nVidia turned a loss last quarter due to competition and their yield issues. To me that shows nV as more suceptible to market fluctuations, whereas intel even in the darkest days of P4 vs Athlon was still a money making machine due to all the cookie jars it had its fingers in.

Should intel play hard and with intent, it's unlikely anyone else will usurp them. The worst thing nVidia could do is entice intel into looking beyond the bottom line and making this personal as if the were a threat. The only reason for nVidia to do this is to force intel to make comments against GPUs to defend CPUs just when they are entering the market. nVidia wants to focus on the CPU vs GPU to keep people thinking of intel as CPU only, instead of thinking, well intel and AMD both have CPU and GPU, what does nV do with just GPU?

Despite all the hype (with nV even hyping their ARM processor) until people move away from X86 and derivative code base, they're going to get squeezed very soon for the 'we can deliver everything' packages that intel and AMD can deliver. Without making people question what you add to that forgone conclusion of an intel processor inside, people will ignore nV's most profitable solutions in the low end and have no money for the high end even if they do it better than the rest.

Short term this is good for competition, long term, this likley is going to be an end-game for more than one participant, and my money's on intel having the resources to survive anything, regardless of whether they have the best solution or not, which isn't necessarily a good thing for us.