With markets drying up and R&D budgets taking a pounding, both Silicon Graphics and Nvidia are facing some tough times. Nvidia are being squeezed in the chipset arena by both Intel and AMD/ATI, and their graphics biz is taking a hit from AMD/ATI and also their recent production issues.

With a number of staff leaving SGI to work at Nvidia, Quadro’s presence in SGI’s visualisation systems, and Nvidia looking more and more to move into high end visualisation, how long will it be before the two companies get together?

A partnership – or even a full merger – would benefit both companies enormously, and allow them to merge R&D spend and come up with some really innovative solutions for high end visualisation problems. CUDA and discrete GPUs as processing units seems to play into SGI’s strategy for mix-and-match processing (see their use of FPGAs in Altix) and with Altix ICE taking off even more, such modular solutions could provide a compelling solution for many different vertical markets.

Will it happen? I think it should, and I forecast that we’ll see some movement in this direction in the coming year, as the economy gets worse.