Musings: Should Intel buy nVidia?

I was recently at a talk by Dave McQueeny, CTO IBM Federal, where he talked about some interesting trends in the industry. One of the things he mentioned was that for some time now it has become difficult for chip companies like Intel to increase the processor speed year after year by 30%.

So it is speculated that Intel stopped marketing giga Hertz as the main reason to upgrade and being smart has shifted the focus to number of core’s in the CPU. AMD has made heat consumption an issue, which again Dave mentioned is an issue because now the power consumed by a processor when its idle versus when it is working is roughly the same and so it never gets to cool down.

Another impact of this shift may be in how ODM’s select chipsets to put on a motherboard. Since they wont be touting giga hertz, they are also shifting to heat consumtion, number of cores etc. Will the graphics capability become an important selling point? You do need sophisticated graphics cards to work with 24″ or 30″ displays.

What do you think?