Intel considered NVIDIA buy to combat AMD Fusion

Intel considered buying graphics chip company NVIDIA, but the regulatory environment caused it to decline the chance, Intel's Pat Gelsinger revealed in an interview.

Gelsinger is senior vice president and general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group and said in an interview with The Inquirer that Intel had been looking "pretty closely" at an acquisition of NVIDIA or ATI.

NVIDIA and ATI are the two largest specialist graphics chip companies in the world. Any plans for acquisition were quickly shelved however, as Intel's rival AMD closed its acquisition of ATI in October last year, while NVIDIA continues as a standalone company.

The acquisition of NVIDIA presented legal concerns for Intel, as it may have given the company a dominant share of the PC processor market. "If number one buys number two or three, what happens regulatory-wise?" Gelsinger said. Intel is currently the leading supplier of graphics technology for PCs because of its integrated graphics chipsets.

Intel's concerns are made more tangible in light of legal action by the European Commission. The EC accused Intel in July this year of "abuse of a dominant market position", claiming they engaged in anti-competitive action against rival AMD.

A possible reason for Intel interest in NVIDIA is their desire to integrate graphics chip technology with conventional PC possessors. Subsequent to AMD's acquisition of ATI, it began a project known as Fusion to integrate graphics chips directly onto a PC processor by 2009.

"The key transition [we're going through now] is in the graphics programming model," Gelsinger told The Inquirer. Instead of teaching programmers how to exploit graphics chips, Intel's plan is to develop a project called "Larrabee". Larrabee will build chips based on Intel existing architecture, x86, with the performance of a graphics chip.

"Larrabee ends the debate on GPGPUs (General Purpose Graphics Processing Units)" Gelsinger said at the Beijing Intel Developer Forum in April. "This is what developers want." However both Fusion and Larrabee will be in development for a considerable time yet.