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I think the main reason Intel would never release a discrete graphics card at this stage is because that'd make it obvious how silly it is to buy both an integrated and discrete GPU as everyone building an Intel gaming PC do today. To not look really stupid they'd have to release a GPU-less CPU to pair with their discrete GPU (apart from the overpriced LGA2011 CPUs to go with the overpriced X79 motherboards) and that'd let AMD and nVidia back into a market that Intel is making a killing off now - using their CPU dominance to put their GPU in every processor, whether you want it or not. Their market share is 62% now and on a rising trend, why risk your cash cow? They basically got a free pass to gently prod AMD and nVidia out of the market without anyone shouting antitrust.

Long term, it's clearly the way for Intel to go. nVidia has no CPU so if Intel keeps their CPU dominance they'll get their profits anyway. They'll even get a free graphics "sale" if the gamer sells the rig minus the gaming cards. Turning it into an APU war with AMD means their CPU and GPU division will rise and fall together, and to be honest in AMDs case I fear one will drag the other down with them. Certainly the odds of them having two stellar parts that steal market share from Intel is less, it makes it harder to change the status quo which is in favor Intel. No, their guns are all pointing at the lower end of the scale, smartphones and tablets.

The graphics market is in my opinion in a solid squeeze on both ends, from Intel on the low end and lack of progress in displays on the high end. Even with all the fancy shaders, graphics cards are still only pushing ~2M pixels on a 1920x1200/1080 screen and high resolution monitors are nowhere but in the rMPB. Like for example before SLI/CF was a really big thing, today you only need it if you're really on the extreme end. Hopefully we can get 4K gaming, that'd at least fire up the high end again...

The illustrations all seem to show an x8 card, but I think what they're saying is they multiplex a PCIe lane over each pair in the SFF-8087 cable. So, eventually you'll be able to run x16 out of a card to your drive bay, and use that now for a 4x4 config, but perhaps a single x16 config in the future.

In short, a slower PCIe extension cord using existing cables (as opposed to the oddball PCIe external cables). This will probably put pressure on mobo vendors to add more x16 slots. I regularly build storage servers with 16 and 24 drive bays, and it looks like top-end now are Tyan AMD boards with 4 x16 slots. I'd like to see, for instance, a SuperMicro with 6 PCIe x16 slots and dual Intel sockets (though I'm using AMD 12-core more and more lately). PCIe 3.0 is due out in a couple months, so probably it will be there - OCZ could also update to the faster coding rate.

http://xtreview.com/addcomment-id-4801-view-Intel-atom-1.6-Ghz-benchmark.html

Really? I've found them to be fairly close in benchmarks I've read, with the Nvidia cards generally holding the edge. (Primarily comparing gtx 260 vs 4870) Can you show me any benchmarks within the last month or so that would possibly change my mind?

Techgage - GTX 260-216 vs 4870
Hexus - GTX 260-216 vs 4870

The GTX 295 looks like it will dominate the 4870x2 once it's released (supposedly in January)

xtreview - GTX 295 vs 4870x2
Fudzilla - GTX 295 vs 4870x2

Not much, by the looks of it.

XTReview has Beta 6956 (which performs like Vista) vs Beta 7000.0 (Beta 1) vs Windows XP Sp3.

Bottom line is that the new Beta is marginally better than Vista in most benchmarks, but slower than XP SP3. Both are much slower in HDD write performance.

Just don't let him bring up the neon tubes and Arctic Silver conductive paste and water-cooled RAM in your own bedroom.

More cores will provide more fun. Maybe a check of TILERA 64- CORE PROCESSOR TILE64 will do?

I'd rather disembowel myself with a corkscrew than run Gnome or buy an Intel processor, thank you.
However, I'm very happy running KDE on my AMD X2 3500. It overclocks like a dream, and only cost me $59.

If you have a look around, the X1900XT actually uses about 110 watts peak, for most board suppliers. The X1900XTX only uses about 120 watts.
There's a few places that confirm this, here they show just the VGA card usage, here they show the total system power usage.