I don't think it is in Intel's interests to take over the high end graphics chipset market. I do think it is in Intel's interests to raise the lowest common denominator, because that spurs the broader PC replacement cycle, as more applications, and even the OS, gradually come to depend on those features. But at the high end, I think fierce competition among ATI, NVDA, etc is good for Intel, because "early adopters", gamers, etc buy higher-end PCs, with higher margin CPUs, on a much faster replacement cycle. If Intel tries to cannibalize this market, and other players drop out, they'll inevitably slow down the rate of innovation and kill this market.
Intel has never attacked the high end, and it isn't for lack of skill/ability to do so. After all, Intel chips (i860) formed the core of many of SGI's high performance graphics systems. I think they will continue to improve the capabilities of their graphics chips to the extent that process improvements allow them to fit more features into a inexpensive low power chip. Eventually that will squeeze even the high end players but I think that is a few years off yet. |
