NVIDIA's next-gen GPUs

NVIDIA's VP of Investor Relations, Mike Hara, recently gave a pair of talks to investors in which he covered a variety of topics that are critical to the company's future: the discrete GPU market, AMD/ATI's R600 launch, Intel's forthcoming discrete GPU product, the high-performance computing market, and so on. Hara's comments on these issues are worth looking into, because they paint a picture of NVIDIA—and the graphics industry in general—at the first major crossroads since the erstwhile 3Dfx fired the opening shot in the 3D GPU wars. NVIDIA has picked one direction, and the other guys have picked two or three. The challenge for NVIDIA, then, lies in making the case that its single-minded focus on delivering the most GigaFLOPS per dollar will keep it ahead of the pack...