Nvidia's chief executive officer Jen-Hsun Huang yesterday lashed out at recent Intel announcements and mocked them at Nvidia's financial analyst day.

Intel - the largest computer chip maker, and Nvidia - the largest graphics card maker, are both planning on encroaching each other's ground and it seems this will lead to a head-on collision. Any doubts or rumours about them partnering can now be confidently dismissed. Both have the same goal - to define the future in the approaching visual computing era, and both want to reach there first.

Huang opened the meet enunciating on the fact that Nvidia is a visual computing company and not a semiconductor corporation, and that its goal is nothing else but to make GPUs better and deliver great experience. But later referred to Intel's discrete visual computing chip "Larrabee" as "Laughabee", and added that Nvidia was "going to open a can of whoop-ass" and that "Intel has crossed the line and they're saying false things".

These explosive statements were perhaps due to recent comments from Intel which include an article by an Intel engineer that states that people "probably" won't need graphic cards in the future anymore.

According to reports, Intel later corrected that with this statement - "Intel is not predicting the end of the discrete graphics business. Moore's Law has allowed Intel to innovate and integrate. As a result, we expect that we and others will integrate graphics and visual computing capabilities directly into our CPUs in the future; much like floating point co-processors and other multimedia functions have in the past. However, we don't expect that this integration will eliminate the market for higher-end discrete graphics cards and the value they provide".

However, the Nvidia CEO made no comment about the nv4_displ.dll driver which is allegedly responsible for almost a third of BSODs (Blue screen of Death) in Windows Vista.

Many emails were sent to analysts by both Intel and Nvidia, each trying to uncover dirt on the other. Let us wait and see who gets to inflict "whoop-ass" on whom. But one thing is clear - whoever wins in the end, the consumer will benefit as the fittest will survive.