Cringely: Intel to buy NVIDIA

“There is a funky dance going on right now between chip giants Intel and nVIDIA and I just want to cut through the crap and tell you that no matter what the companies are saying it is likely to end with nVIDIA being purchased by Intel. Both parties know it and the only thing that hasn’t been determined yet is the price, which is what all this posturing is about,” Bob Cringely writes for I. Cringely.

“Intel this week cancelled Larrabee, its proposed graphics processing unit (GPU) that was intended to compete with both nVIDIA and ATi (now a part of AMD). The moment AMD bought ATi Intel had to decide whether to build or buy its own GPU to stay in contention,” Cringely writes. “They decided to build, or at least said they had. It’s hard to say how viable Larrabee ever was but at some point it turned from a weapon against nVIDIA to a barrier to Intel buying nVIDIA. So Larrabee had to go, because without that chip Intel presents a much less imposing target for the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission which might oppose a merger on anti-trust grounds.”

Cringely writes, “With Larrabee, Intel could be seen as crushing a major rival. Without Larrabee, Intel is just trying to enter a new market.”

Much more in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]