Reverse engineering: more than NVIDIA deserves?

Keep in mind that both Intel and AMD are bundling 3D accelerators onto new 
processors, and this has been common knowledge for something like a year 
now:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/29/1252203
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070211-8810.html

Here's actual product names (Intel's "Nehalem" and AMD's "Fusion") and 
shipping schedules.  It all comes out about a year from now:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/11/26/intel_cpu_integra...

Ars Technica has a good summary of Intel's follow-up, explicitly comparing 
Intel's plans to IBM/Sony's Cell processor:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070416-intel-offic...
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070604-clearing-up...

The basic driving force is that transistor budgets keep going up.  Even 
the venerable Pentium M had 2 megabytes of L2 cache, and Core 2 duo and 
Core 2 Quatro put 2 or 4 entire processors on the die in an attempt to 
soak up the transistor budget and translate that into performance gains 
and profit margins.  But most desktops can't soak up more than a couple of 
processors before it's just not noticeable.  (Servers may be able to, and 
developer workstations can, but most home computers doing email, web 
browsing, watching the occasional youtube video...  The third and fourth 
cores just sit idle, let alone cores 5-8 on an 8 way system.)

Bundling a GPU on the die is something all end user desktops want these 
days, and it just _sucks_up_ transistors.  Now instead of 4 processors 
sharing a pool of L2 cache, you can have 2 processors and a GPU, and your 
average desktop can keep them all running at full speed.  It also means 
you can increase the L2 cache size again (because it's now used as texture 
memory too, so you can go to 16 megs, 32, 64...), and it means that the 
highest clocked hardware in the system is locally processing graphics with 
the fastest possible interconnects with the CPU.  (There isn't even a 
_bus_ between the CPU and GPU anymore.)

Of course if Intel's doing this, AMD is too.  (Why do you think they 
bought ATI?)

Where does that leave Nvidia?  Well, nvidia is trying to stay relevant by 
purchasing a physics engine company and hoping all the game consoles start 
using that:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=222
http://technologyexpert.blogspot.com/2008/02/geforce-8-gp...

That's really what Nvidia cares about: game consoles.  If they have to 
make a choice between game consoles and PC GPUs, it's pretty clear where 
their money comes from.

They're also trying hard to grab as much volume as they can before Intel 
and AMD bundle GPUs on-die with the CPU, perhaps to get game developers 
hooked on their physics engine before the market for standalone 3D chips 
goes the way of the northbridge:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/10/29/gpu_market_q3_07/

To which Intel replied:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/09/17/intel_to_buy_havok/

*shrug*  It's interesting to watch.  The market is driving Intel and 
Nvidia into direct collision (especially as people try to use GPUs as 
general purpose compting devices), and Intel is pretty darn good at what 
it does...