"You missed the point", told me Nvidia's Kevin Krewell yesterday at MPF Spring, about my coverage of ATI 's Radeon HD 2000 graphics chips launch two weeks ago.

And he's absolutely right. Mea Culpa. Indeed, during AMD's head of the graphics group, Rick Bergman (right), presentation I missed the fact that out of the 10 chips announced, there was only one really shipping. And that, no matter how you put it, this is just a "paper launch", pure and simple. So what happened, Henri [AMD's sales & marketing chief] of your pledge of not doing paper launches? Well here's a nice one!

But really, the worse is that ATI's high-end chip is only catching up with Nvidia's entry-level GeForce 8 chip. The folks at ATI must have been really surprised of the performance Nvidia got out of that chip when they launched it, six months ago. Now six months later, they are still not able to catch up. On paper, their chip looks good. But in benchmarks, there is seem to be a problem. Perhaps it's the drivers, or something else. Also, their chip is pumping way more power/watts than Nvidia's. And the 9 series is coming as scheduled this year... Not sounding too good for AMD/ATI... unless... well, unless AMD is not really interested to compete head-to-head with ATI in the discrete market, at least not as agressively as before, and focusing most of it's energy in its battle with Intel, making sure that AMD/ATI's integrated graphics blow away Intel's. Which, today, is not very hard to do ;-)