During yesterday's financial meeting with the market analysts, Nvidia's chief executive officer Jen-Hsun Huang promised that the graphics card specialist would start the rebellion against Intel on the integrated graphics market.

For years, the two companies have been involved in a supremacy war, but few details were uncovered to the press. Most of the clashes took place between closed doors, with slide shows of the upcoming technology and intricate profit figures. The two semiconductor giants, however, started to take at each other's neck earlier this year.

"We're going to open a can of whoop ass," Jen-Hsun Huang told analysts, accompanied by a roar of laughter. The greatest battle between the two semiconductor giants is carried on the integrated graphics market, where Intel starts to make its presence felt.

Intel was the first to pick up the tomahawk against its arch-rival during the last week's Intel Developer Forum.

"First, graphics that we have all come to know and love today, I have news for you. It's coming to an end," claimed Intel's senior vice president Pat Gelsinger. "Our multi-decade old 3D graphics rendering architecture that's based on a rasterization approach is no longer scalable and suitable for the demands of the future," he continued.

Gelsinger was referring to the company's multi-core graphics project, called the Larrabee. However, his statement set Nvidia on fire, as the first Larrabee units will target at the same market ruled by Nvidia and its rival AMD.

According to Intel, there is no use in spending more money on a state-of-the-art graphics card, since the same performance can be achieved by using more powerful processors, with multiple CPU cores. As previously reported, Intel's Nehalem micro-architecture, paired with the company's integrated graphics could fully replace Nvidia or AMD's discrete graphics cards.

However, Huang says that Intel's integrated graphics cores are "a joke," and even if the CPU manufacture manages to release a 10 times more powerful graphics core until 2010, they will still be trailing Nvidia's current offerings.

Intel's response hit a sensitive spot in the company's offerings, namely the incomplete graphics drivers that cause crashes when installed on Vista machines.

"NVIDIA has to support several new titles every week," Huang said. "You already have the right machine to run Excel. You bought it four years ago," he concluded.