After last week’s Intel Developer Forum, it’s now Nvidia’s turn. Later on today the company will open its three-day GPU Technology Conference in San Jose – a more formal affair than last year’s flashy “Nvision” expo, but still a high-profile international event, and one which yours truly is lucky enough to be attending.

(The picture, in case you’re wondering, is a strange engine-type affair that’s been set up at the entrance to the delegates’ hotel, apparently to welcome us as we arrive. I guess that’s how they communicate with one another down here in the Valley.)

Under pressure

Yet despite the company’s outward confidence, you have to wonder whether the green team really enjoys its 72 hours under the spotlight. Last year the recurrent themes of the event were faulty notebook GPUs and Larrabee – hardly the issues Nvidia will have wanted to focus on.

This year the notebook GPU issue seems to have died away, and it’s become clear that Larrabee is no threat for the immediate future. Yet Nvidia is still on the back foot in several fights. In the desktop market, it’s been playing catch-up with ATI for over a year: it’s rumoured that a new generation of GeForce cards may be unveiled in the coming days, but they’ll have to be very impressive to compete with the ATI Radeon HD 5870.

Challenged by new technology

In the mobile and lightweight markets, meanwhile, the company’s Tegra and Ion platforms have attracted praise, but will soon be challenged by Intel’s two new Atom architectures – Moorestown for handhelds and the CE4100 for media devices. Nvidia did well to get to these markets first, but can it really cling onto the territory now Intel’s tanks are rolling into town?

And lastly there’s CUDA. This time last year, Nvidia was touting the flexibility of CUDA as a unique benefit of Nvidia hardware, and since then the technology has shown its potential in some real-world applications – notably the built-in CUDA acceleration for Premiere Pro CS4. But now that DirectX 11 is here, its extensive platform-agnostic GPGPU functions make CUDA’s exclusivity look like a liability.

With all this in mind, I think it will be very interesting to see what the company has to say for itself over the coming days. Stay tuned and I’ll report back with all the news and nuggets that emerge…