Nvidia to quit chipset business

[Uber_Tiny]

Nvidia has decided to throw in the towel and quit the chipset business, sources close to the situation at one of Taiwan's top motherboard makers have revealed. As the story is told, Nvidia called a meeting earlier this week with its motherboard partners to gauge support for it continuing to develop chipsets in the future.


The motherboard makers' response? Silence.
It is still early days and not all the facts are known at the time of writing, but it is believed Nvidia will transfer the chipset team to working on GPU projects. On the motherboard makers' side, some makers have already canceled upcoming high-end motherboard projects based on the nForce 7-series chipset.


The loss of its chipset business is expected to have a significant impact on Nvidia's GPU business in the short-term. Reception to the nForce 200 chip (BR04) which will enable SLI technology on Intel X58 motherboards has been lukewarm at best, with many makers saying they will not bother adding the chip on their boards. This means Nvidia needs to find a way of licensing and enabling multi-GPU support on motherboards using Intel and/or AMD chipsets fast. Otherwise it will have to cede the top-end of the graphics card market to AMD, which now has the benefit of Crossfire.

The news would also debunk any recent speculation that Apple will be adopting Nvidia chipsets for its upcoming notebook products. It would be unfortunate if Apple really has poured water on the close relationship it has built with Intel over the past few years, only to have its new best friend exit the market before products are even announced.

This is just a rumor...no solid evidence of it yet.

[Uraloserface101]

usually when companies tend focus on one particular product, that product is far more superior than others. Nvidia dominates with their graphics cards, i wouldnt really mind so much however in this case the product is a piece that works so great with the cards! i would still be sad if they let it go!

[Uber_Tiny]

Official response from NVIDIA:

The story on Digitimes is completely groundless. We have no intention of getting out of the chipset business.

In fact, our MCP business is as strong as it ever has been for both AMD and Intel platforms:

a. Mercury Research has reported that the NVIDIA market share of AMD platforms in Q2 08 was 60%. We have been steady in this range for over two years.

b. SLI is still the preferred multi-GPU platform thanks to its stellar scaling, game compatibility and driver stability.

c. nForce 790i SLI is the recommended choice by editors worldwide due to its compelling combination of memory performance, overclocking, and support for SLI. In fact, a recent article on Tom’s Hardware recently came to the same conclusion: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...I,1977-29.html



We're looking forward to bring new and very exciting MCP products to the market for both AMD and Intel platforms.

Grabbed from off Rage3D

[Rollo]

I chatted with Bryan Del Rizzo of NVIDIA earlier tonight, rumor is total BS.

[Uber_Tiny]

I chatted with Bryan Del Rizzo of NVIDIA earlier tonight, rumor is total BS.

Thank you for the clarification Rollo.