NOT CONTENT WITH WAGING war with Chipzilla, Nvidia is back on the PR offensive against ATI, too.

Yes, it's the man with the plan, the inimitable Roy 'The Boy' Taylor who, not content with his job liaising with development houses to implement its TWIMTBP scheme, is piping up about ATI's market share. Or, rather, the perceived lack of it.

Talking to legendary hardware hack Jeremy 'Don't call me Lord' Laird, Taylor said that "The UK is the only place in the world where anyone talks about AMD or ATI, "referring to marketshare and mindshare statistics that put DAAMIT's graphics card share at around 12 per cent.

Taylor went on to suggest that ATI's 18 per cent share of the 366 million graphics chips shipped in 2007 meant that "No one cares" about the company or its grahics platforms.

But that's not all. The Boy also fired another salvo in the ongoing war of words (others may call it a pissing match) with Intel. He lampooned the current perceived imbalance of CPU and GPU in the system "obscene", and said that general purpose GPU applications are going to quickly show just how bad the CPU is at most tasks. "When you look at the question of whether you should transcode video on a GPU or CPU, when you consider it in performance-per-buck terms, it's currently obscenely the wrong way round," he reckons.

Oh, but not so. Intel has launched its own pre-emptive strike, pushing new Powerpoint slides to its partners showing how the GPU is basically a waste of money. When considering performance in 3D rendering, music and photo encoding as well as video playback, GPU upgrades offer 'No Benefit' according to Chipzilla, helpfully illustrated by a big red cross. Upgrading your processor is 'Clearly the best improvement for your money', says Intel's slide deck.

Of course, that begs the question: if the GPU is such a waste of time, why is Intel going to quite a lot of trouble to come up with its own version, Larrabbee? Taylor has an answer to this. “Why does Larrabee exist? Why is Intel coming for us? They're coming for us because they can see the performance advantage of our GPUs,” he said.

We suspect that Intel will pursue its normal strategy here - GPU is rubbish until Intel sorts it out, at which point it will be awesome. Cynical, us? µ