[citation][nom]jerreece[/nom]In all reality, Intel and nVidia shouldn't be fighting each other. In some sense, they are equally competitors against ATI/AMD. This bickering isn't helping either of them.[/citation]
That's not entirely true. Intel, unlike AMD, uses proprietary* interconnects for their designs, meaning costly fees for AMD to use, for example, QPI or DMI, if and only if Intel actually feels like selling that license.
Intel played this game already, and won, because nVidia gave up and allowed Intel to support SLI technology on an Intel board, without those n200 PCIe switches they previously insisted on, which would have required Intel to pay nVidia for each Intel board produced (that supported SLI of course...)
Simply put, nVidia is squeezed out of making any Intel chipsets.
Intel has yet to allow outside parties to manufacture QPI/DMI based chipsets (of which only nVidia would theoretically make any).
Sure they can keep making C2D ones, they still have the license for FSB interconnect (which I think is open now anyway).
AMD, on the other hand, uses HyperTransport which is open, anyone (including Intel*, in fact) can make HTX chipsets to support AMD processors with relatively no license fees, there is probably something they have to pay to use AMD branding or something but that's about it.
nVidia partially shot themselves in the foot w/ AMD by deciding to not make embedded/enterprise chipsets anymore after the MCP55 series, in fact, so did Broadcom. This forced AMD to acquire ATI (originally the intent was to merge with nVidia, and it very nearly happened, but afaik Ruiz refused to give up control or something) so it wouldn't just give up the embedded market to Intel or VIA.
nVidia and AMD, actually have a much better relationship with each other than Intel and nVidia ever did.
Consider...
nVidia, to this day, still sells nForce 4 based chips on brand new motherboards. They aren't PCIe 2.0, but they do have integrated video, and will support any processor they put a socket on it for. In fact, if they really wanted to, they could go back to the nForce 3 and still produce 6-core capable boards. Such is the beauty of HTX, and it's open business model. Intel... not so much. Mind you this isn't a rant on Intel's unfair this or that, I happen to like Intel and AMD equally, and will continue to choose whomever fits my budget.
[citation][nom]englandr753[/nom]Could be interesting if Nvidia and ATI did this together to put the squeeze on Intel. It won't happen but its an interesting thought...[/citation]
It would be suicidal, because you really can't do that unless you've decided to make your very own PC interconnect. If you're using anything common, say PCIe, you are legally obligated to make sure it's compatible, that's why it's a standard.
If you go off and decide to make your own completely different interconnect architecture, you're committing business suicide.
For one, you'd have to spend tons of cash to develop the new I/Os.
Then, you'd have to hope that companies will want to adopt it... good luck with that.
*... and by proprietary I mean Intel take something like PCIe (DMI) or HyperTransport (QPI) and redesign it slightly and give it a proprietary name.
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