Some companies take a very laid back approach to the press. I could publicly allege that Itanium was a front for a money-laundering operation and I doubt I’d hear a peep of complaint from Intel.

Actually, that might explain a lot. But I digress.

The point is that Nvidia, unlike Intel, is acutely tuned in to what people are saying about it — and can be quick to respond.

I well recall how, at last year’s Nvision event, one fledgling journalist received a stern dressing down from PR director Derek Perez mere hours after she’d posted an online article that cheekily – but accurately – reported his impression of CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s keynote address. (For the record, it was “dull and boring.”)

So I wasn’t wholly surprised when this morning, at the conclusion of my meeting with CUDA general manager Sanford Russell, I was ushered into a luxurious suite on the twentieth floor of San Jose’s Fairmont Hotel for an impromptu chat with Tony Tamasi, Nvidia’s Senior VP for content and technology, on the subject of my last blog post.

A billion dollars on CUDA

It turned out that Tamasi wanted to respond to two points. The first was the doubt I had expressed over whether CUDA could ever be a real money-maker for Nvidia.

“Supercomputing,” he assured me, “is a billion-dollar market.”

This I could not deny; but given CUDA’s apparent focus on academia, it seemed a surprisingly ambitious figure for Nvidia to be bandying about.

So I asked: “Have you made a billion dollars from it this year?”

“Of course not,” Tamasi laughed. “But we believe in the potential. We’ve been investing heavily in that for years. And when the market arrives, we’re going to be at the head of it.”

He showed me a slide demonstrating how Nvidia expects its investment to pay off:

— and I could only agree that – if PowerPoint was to be believed – there did appear to be a lot of money out there for the taking.

“So you’re going to sell ten thousand GPUs to the Department of Defence?”

“At least!” he declared confidently.

There’s no telling how much this market will really turn out to be worth to Nvidia. But the company’s investments in research have indeed positioned it well to “trickle up” into industry and government; and with CUDA now programmable in C++, the company’s ambitions are sounding increasingly credible. I wouldn’t bet against the technology growing quickly in these areas – in the short term, at least.

Sizing up Larrabee

But what of the longer game? I was half joking when I suggested that Larrabee might displace CUDA, but Tamasi agreed that it was a possibility.

“Intel is… not very excited when they see a researcher talking about porting code from Intel CPUs to Nvidia GPUs and getting a hundred-fold speed-up,” he predicted.

“And those are the super-high-margin juicy CPUs for Intel.”

“So Intel is defending their computing front. And I agree with you that Larabee is at least partly an effort to try to keep applications from going to the GPU style of parallelism.”

Is Nvidia worried about the long-term challenge?

“Nobody knows how good Larrabee is,” Tamasi mused. “Probably Intel doesn’t know how good Larrabee is. So we take them incredibly seriously.”

“There are strengths and weaknesses to their style of architecture. And I just don’t know how that’s going to play out.”