NVIDIA's VP of Investor Relations, Mike Hara, recently gave a pair of talks to investors in which he covered a variety of topics that are critical to the company's future: the discrete GPU market, AMD/ATI's R600 launch, Intel's forthcoming discrete GPU product, the high-performance computing market, and so on. Here's an excerpt:

This fall will not only see the introduction of the next G80 derivative at the high end, but Hara also stated that the company will start to product its first 65nm GPUs. Moving its GPU line from 90nm to 65nm will bring NVIDIA to process parity with AMD/ATI (not that the 65nm feature size appears to have given the R600 any advantage in performance or power dissipation), and it will give the company the flexibility to increase either their performance or their profit margins, depending on how AMD/ATI's next-generation part fares.

In the end, a lot of what Hara had to say about HPC and discrete graphics was stuff that you've probably heard before: the 50x speedups on certain types of workloads that you can get from using GPUs, NVIDIA's plans to bring double-precision floating-point to their parts in the near future, and so on. More interesting, however, was the fact that his HPC discussion was also premised on the notion that Intel's first Larrabee products won't be competitive in terms of performance with whatever NVIDIA has out at the time of Larrabee's launch. I'm not sure what to make of this assumption, because only time will tell if it bears out. Regardless, the idea that NVIDIA can keep a performance lead over Intel in raw FLOPS is critical not only to the company's growth prospects but to its very survival. As I said above, NVIDIA is putting all of its eggs in the discrete GPU basket, and if Intel out-engineers them in that game, then it's all over.