Intel is making the necessary steps to stay relevant as we see smaller lower power devices become the norm. Ultrabooks (and their silly netbook cousins of the

Intel is making the necessary steps to stay relevant as we see smaller lower power devices become the norm. Ultrabooks (and their silly netbook cousins of the past) are merely stepping stones on the path to more embedded, power sipping devices everywhere in our lives. I'm curious to know what this means for Nvidia. Nvidia is now essentially competing on both big fronts. On one end, nvidia has to stay relevant with its video cards. Things like Tesla are going to be big business, but how do you compete with intel's on chip offering and keep power demands low enough? On the other side of the wall you have Tegra. Intel is a much easier target here as the Tegra is arm based and can already be found in android phones and tablets. And as the article indicates Haswell is still not equipped to truly compete with Tegra at the low end of the power spectrum. Also, and it hurts to mention it, what about AMD? Bulldozer was at best a lukewarm release and piledriver still isn't out. On the other hand, AMD's graphics offerings still compete well with Nvidia. Big box retailers don't offer much in the way of AMD but ATI still sees significant usage. Dell, for example, only offers opterons in its servers, but offers plenty of AMD graphics cards in consumer offerings. But as AMD still has the same problem as Nvidia: this side of the business is being disrupted by things like Ultrabooks and tablets though so its hard to see how this will last. For AMD to compete with intel, it would seem they need to focus on SoC designs. Lastly, one thing I found very interesting was the various winks and nods to the fact that intel creates a lot of interesting features that are more expensive, but only 'one' manufacturer ever uses them with the need for the stick. That manufacturer is clearly Apple. People often like to parrot the meme that Macs are simply more expensive PCs but it seem clear here that other manufacturers require the stick to get them to make improvements to their boards. > Intel gave one example where an embedded controller on a motherboard was using 30 - 50mW of power. Through some simple firmware changes Intel was able to drop this particular controller's power consumption down to 5mW. It's not rocket science, but this is Intel's way of doing some of the work that its OEM partners should have been doing for the past decade. Apple has done some of this on its own (which is why OS X based notebooks still enjoy tangibly longer idle battery life than their Windows counterparts), but Intel will be offering this to many of its key OEM partners and in a significant way. You don't drop power consumption by an order of magnitude that easily unless the original chip was seriously poorly designed.