ARM's Ascension

NVIDIA hopes to grow their Tegra business to eventually make up 50% of their revenue. By scoring a win with the Zune HD, possibly ending up in the future Nintendo handheld and Apple products, and countless other media, phone, and computing devices, it's no wonder why their expectations might be high. SoCs have always been very popular in the ultra-portable scene, and Tegra is among many leading the way for the future of this technology sector. With hardware accelerated flash, video, graphics and audio support, the capabilities of such SoCs has grown to the point of surpassing the form-factor of just smartphones, to encompass a vast array of devices extending all the way up to notebook-like devices, dubbed "smartbooks".

It's for this reason that ARM is becoming better positioned to take the computing world by storm in the near future. With their recent partnership with the newly formed GlobalFoundries manufacturing company, it's clear they intend on increasing the capabilities of their chips beyond the scope of what they're best known for today.

NVIDIA's Fermi

Fermi is the name of the architecture for NVIDIA's next gen (DX11) cards. Fermi was announced ahead of actual card announcements or even just information about gaming features. All that was talked about, in fact, was Tesla-related shit, but despite that I've read all kinds of bullcrap from people jumping to all kinds of ridiculous conclusions about it.

Once again, this was an announcement for Tesla. Companies looking to make large investments in new servers and HPC systems need a lot of lead time to make decisions, and NVIDIA was trying to appeal to them, as well as investors and stock holders, proving that Fermi is real and that there are some really cool things to look forward to about it. AMD released their shit, so now NVIDIA wants to make some sort of response, even if it isn't actual hardware. This was an announcement to gain mindshare, nothing more.