nVidia Wants Everyone to Know : GPU > CPU

nVidia is flyin' high these days: 790i and Quad-SLI were recently launched, and the G92 cards are making a strong showing with the fastest single-GPU card, fastest multi-GPU card, and the fastest multi-card configurations. All of that only makes Jen-Hsun Huang hungrier, apparently. With ATI pretty well trounced (which was more Ruiz's doing than Huang's), it looks like the only way for nVidia to get more marketshare is to start grabbing it from Intel. The first shot has been fired: The Optimized PC Initiative (cue foreboding music).

The Optimized PC Initiative is pretty simple: Spend more money on graphics cards and less money on CPU's! nVidia's premise for saying this is the claim that CPU's have become "fast enough" and now the GPU is new the "center" of the PC. They suggest that modern computer usage has become mainly a visual experience, and users would be much better served by a higher-end graphics card rather than a higher-end CPU. One of their marketing slides illustrates:First and foremost, I want to say that on a large scale, marketwide, raising awareness about the importance of the GPU is not a bad thing. Video cards are important and do enable the rich visual experiences that the PC provides. It's a message that certainly has resonance.

However, this type of anti-campaign is always going to raise eyebrows and elicit scrutiny. Is nVidia ready for that? For myself, I don't see the whole thing being completely sound. Every specific application reacts so differently to hardware that making blanket statements about what is "optimized" is never going to be completely correct. (I'd say the same thing if Intel tried to do this.) You can't even isolate gaming to try to make complete sense with this, because many titles do benefit significantly from a faster CPU. When you throw into the argument that many power users do much more than game on their PC's, the message is immediately irrelevant. Intel isn't sleeping here! They work closely with developers to make sure their software is multi-core optimized, just like nVidia does for their GPU's. The strength of the PC platform is flexibility and customization, so any enthusiast is going to tailor their system to what they want to do with it, probably even down to the specific software they want to use. If that software is more GPU-centric, then nVidia is already going to get the focus in the budget... so what's the point?

I think the relevance of the whole campaign applies much more to the low-end of the market. You can see the chart above is specifically citing pretty low-end hardware for comparison, and really, that's where nVidia is battling Intel right now. With the upcoming Hybrid SLI capable boards leading the charge and Optimized PC the message behind it, nVidia has a plan for attacking the space that's typically been dominated by integrated graphics chips that everyone loathes. The low-end market is monstrous and a move against that space has implications that reach into the gaming industry as well. This is all very relevant in light of the hubbub over PC/Console gaming and the PC Gaming Alliance's message. This is the right track to raising the minimum performance spec and keeping the PC as a viable platform for the masses.

So, I think the whole thing is an interesting move, but I don't think it will go unanswered. Intel is a truly formidable opponent to rustle up, so I see some drama in the near future.

UPDATE 4/10 : "NVIDIA CEO: "We're Going to Open a Can of Whoop Ass"
"Nvidia CEO goes on Intel rant"