Nvidia's chief took another swipe at Intel's planned Larrabee graphics chip on Monday, at the Nvision 2008 conference, suggesting the chip would trail Nvidia's best effort several years from now when it is expected in the market.

In past comments, graphics chip maker Nvidia described Larrabee - a high-end graphics chip expected in 2009 or 2010 with ten or more cores - as a GPU from 2006, falling short its promised performance.

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.

He said Intel's claim that Larrabee will work smoothly with Windows-based programs because it is built on the x86 technology in today's computer chips is a "smoke screen." The only benefit is that it will have some existing software tools to draw on, he said.

Huang added that the increasing competition in the graphics chip market should be good for the business.

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

By Mark Boslet, Editor at Large.