By 2013, the cost of making a solar cell could fall to $1 to $1.20 a watt, Swanson said at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University.

He said it is difficult to say what retail prices would result. But estimates show prices of about $1.44 are possible.

"At that price, we see unlimited growth potential for our industry," he added.

"We're focused on GPUs. You can get a perfectly fine CPUs for not much money".

They were a major piece of the "philosophy" driving development, Singhal said.

"So for the rest of the interview I will be pulling a Tom Cruise [as Huang tried to reach Helfer's height]".

"The first person in the world that talked about the chip issue was me, right? I issued a press release with a $200 million reserve and in fact our customers were saying 'Jen-Hseng why are you doing that?'", the Nvidia CEO said in a press briefing.

"VIA has a really terrific CPU, the Nano... You put Nano with GeForce together and you put a box around it, you'd think it's a high-performance computer. Everything works: Blu-Ray works, DX10 works, all game works. It's small, it's low cost, consumes very little power. It's unbelievable", Huang said.

The optimization is a huge investment for the company, he said at the San Jose event. But the chip is a terrific CPU, Huang said.

"People who go to Siggraph are researchers and we'll still do that. But the end-markets don't go to Siggraph... Some of the hard core programmers will go but there, but there are a lot of visual artists that don't go. Obviously there are a lot of gamers who don't go. A lot of the actual car designers that don't go. But the people who create the tools for the car designers go. We think we need to create an industry event for visual computing that goes far beyond than just internal core.

Siggraph is fabulous... but we need something bigger than that. We also wanted to define the industy. Like Cisco defines the networking industry. So a lot of the companies can say 'Hey, we're in the visual computing business'. And people would understand what that meant", Huang said.

"We are on the cusp of a display revolution," Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang said Monday at a San Jose industry trade show. The industry used to be all about color, he said. "Now it's about more dimensionalization."

"We transformed industry after industry," he said, referring to graphics chip manufacturers. Automobiles are now designed digitally, movie makers use use digital effects, and video games get more realistic each year.

On Monday, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang added to the criticism, saying no one yet knows what Larrabee's performance will be. "By the time Larrabee ships, Nvidia's technology will be so much more advanced," he said at the Nvision conference in San Jose. "Maybe Intel is talking about our past" when it trumpets the product.

The new competition will draw attention to the need for graphics chips. "Competition, in fact, frames an industry," he said.

"First of all, IDF is not that big. IDF is really for the PC eco-system. Nvision is really for the visual computing eco-systems: it includes PC companies but includes consumer electronics companies and includes the end-markets (films, photography, gaming, industrial design...).

You're going to see that this is a much much larger presence... 600 reporters. I think it's an order of magnitude larger than WinHEC and IDF.

And the reason for that, this is not about us. It's about our eco-systems... We made it a point not to announce products here. This is not our platform to announce products. This is a platform for the eco-system. Of course we had to do the heavy lifting the first time but hopefully next year, the whole industry does the heavy lifting. This is there platform", explains Huang.