The Battle for the Fastest Graphic Card: Fire!

If we can criticize Apple for not offering the last top notch graphic card with its hardware models, it allows us not to suffer from the never-ending battle between ATI/AMD and NVidia for the fastest graphic card, being used as a marketing flagship to improve sales on the mass market (entry level and mid-range graphic cards). While ATI/AMD unveiled the Radeon HD 2900 XT, and took back the leadership, Nvidia announced its new flagship, the Geforce 8800 Ultra last week. Following this announcement, ATI/AMD decided to postpone the introduction of Radeon HD 2900 XTX originally planned for September, and might replace it with the more powerful HD 2950 XTX.
This is probably the last effects of an ending era as graphic cards are now the most power consuming component in a desktop computer. It goes exactly in the opposite direction to the one followed by Intel and AMD for now months with the performance/watt scale. In additional, GPU cooling system are reaching their physical limits and GPU architecture and design will need to be revisited as Intel and AMD did it 2 years ago.
This could also explain why AMD acquired ATI and why NVidia is looking for a deeper partnership with Intel. One should not forget that couple of months ago, Intel announced its goal to offer true GPU targeting the mid-range hardware and not only graphic chipset dedicated to entry-level models (especially for notebook).