Microsoft, Intel wary of Nvidia's power

But the situation is complicated by political infighting at chip giant Intel.

Intel views Nvidia as a threat although there are factions at the chip giant who wish to deal with the company and give it a licence to use the Pentium 4 front side bus.

But more powerful voices within the Santa Clara corporation are very wary of the potential power of Nvidia, and, perhaps more interestingly here, don't like outside companies trying to push them into making decisions.

That, too, is the case with Microsoft, which doesn't like it all when Nvidia attempts to dictate Direct X agenda.

There's a sound financial reason, too, why Intel doesn't necessarily want to deal with the graphical chip firm. Intel makes a lot of cash from its core logic chipsets and uses this division to help it to persuade its PC customers to buy its CPUs, with the much larger margins that the microprocessors attract.

And Nvidia has much better technology than Intel, so if it had a licence for the Pentium 4 that would snip valuable dollars off the bottom line.

The strategic alliance that Intel has with Nvidia's rival ATI is a way for Chipzilla to remind it who's boss - or who thinks it's boss, anyway.

We have also learned some interesting background on why Microsoft decided, at the very last minute, to choose an Intel Pentium III for the X-Box rather than AMD.

Phone calls between Dr Andy Grove and Bill Gates had something to do with the decision, but only AMD ended up being surprised - with quite a few of them not realising what decision Microsoft had made until after it was announced.

It's good to know that the maelstrom which is the PC industry continues to swirl just as frantically as it always has done. µ