I doubt intel will buy them because Jen will want to demand the position of CEO of intel and I doubt their board of directors will allow it. Microsoft and sony and valve maybe will have to start obeying amd from now on LOL.

ahem

http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2013/09/25/steam-rolling-into-your-living-room/

Do you believe that it will gain huge traction though ? I almost don't see any audience for it. 

Remains to be seen, I have my doubts but I wouldn't write Valve off just yet. It was more a counterpoint to the guys post, considering that Nvidia have aparently been working with Valve to the point of having actual Nvidia engineers working at Valve kinda counters the Steammachines+AMD equals trouble for Nvidia angle. Clearly Nvidia already have their foot firmly in that door.

These are strange and exiting times with a lot of different factors and forces. It will be a few years before we see how it all shakes out. There are just so many unknowns right now, and there are major players that haven't really shown their hand yet. We will need to see benchmarks prices and see how many developers and games support what.

The potential for this is huge. This also answers the question of what EA will do about SteamOS: Just release EA games on linux using Mantle!!!

Yeah but there are some very important key differences between this and PhysX:

-PhysX adds nothing to the core gameplay and lowers framerates whereas Mantle will increase performance.

-PhysX does not work on non-Nvidia cards whereas Mantle is open to developers.

Mantle is initially only for Windows... they will port to Linux in the future.

The API will support only GCN hardware... so less than 20% of the market?

BTW MS will never permit this API grow up... at maximum MS will change the DirectX to make AMD, nVidia, devs, etc happy.

Some how I doubt using the mantle api for nvidia will be useful, infact I could see nvidia cards having less performance on it than they would be on DX11 because this api was made to specifically expose amd's gcn capabilites. Then there is the possibility of AMD playing dirty such as trying to make mantle exclusive to their own cards like nvidia does for cuda. It could happen seeing as how amd owns the api and could instantly lock out nvidia but I expect better integrity from amd than nvidia at this point. I don't think amd will throw away the gcn arhitecture for a very long time seeing as how they need it to support hUMA and beyond. Somehow I've got a bad feeling how this will end up for nvidia seeing as how amd has about 10 years to leverage the support it needs for this api to become massive. 

I hope this and SteamOS forces MS to release the latest Dx for older Windows versions.

I don't know if you guys see a big downside in this new API...

To be close to the hardware you need to eliminate all the abstraction level used to deal with different types of hardware... so this API will be limited to one unique kind of hardware (GCN).

So forget nVidia or any other GPU hardware.... low-level API can't deal with different hardware... that's kill the purpose of a low-level API. If you start to add abstraction level to support more hardware you will go back to DirectX/OpenGL.

The API is open but it can deal with only one hardware to maintain this low-level access.

For each similar hardware a new API will need to be created i you want this advantage... so for each Family in nVidia GPU will need to have it own API... same for AMD... each family a new API.

While that DirectX and OpenGL support every family of GPU from any company since... well... forever.

PS. This API will be dead when AMD moved to a new architecture in the future.