Identity crisis?
"Nvidia's management doesn't think it has an identity crisis," tech-spert Jim McGregor of In-Stat told HEXUS, adding "they are pretty clear on the company's direction - Discrete GPUs, GPGPU, and Tegra."
"I anticipate that Nvidia will make a big push on CUDA at this week's bash," added Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64 who also believes the firm will discuss the architecture of its new GPU, the GT300, and possibly show off its performance and announce availability.
"Maybe they'll unveil a strategy for maintaining their platform business once Intel rolls out its Pinetrail, Calpella and Ibex Peak platforms next year," Brookwood added.
"And Tesla - oy, will we hear about Tesla and Cuda and how it has or soon will save the world," chipped in Jon Peddie.
But as to how NVIDIA may address some of its upcoming road bumps, analysts seemed a little more uncertain.
"Don't expect to see an answer to the challenges that the company faces, just expect to see more about their products, strategy, and roadmaps," said McGregor, who noted there was no doubt NVIDIA's environment was becoming "challenging."
"But," continued McGregor, "with the lack of information from Intel on Larrabee and the release of OpenCL and DirectCompute on Snow Leopard and Windows 7, respectively, things would seem to be on the more positive side for Nvidia."
It's certainly true that the firm does appear to be gaining some traction with its Ion chipset and is also one of the few processor vendors really sinking its teeth into the smartphone/MID market with a host of OEM design wins for Tegra.
"I expect a lot of Tegra announcements and Zunes to be auctioned off or given out as door prizes," added Peddie with more than a whiff of cynicism.
"Nvidia has new competition from a refreshed ATI/AMD, soon from Intel, and the IGPO business is going away, so the company has to work harder than ever to be the super star it has been," he continued, adding that the "old Nvidia" was a tough act to follow.
Our appetite, however, has been whetted by what an NVIDIA bigwig had to say recently, commenting on the upcoming GT300 graphics processor as "more like a CPU than a GPU."
