Apr 1, 2011 12:26 GMT  ·  By

It seems that the occurrences involving flames and NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 590 dual-chip card aren't the only thing causing controversy about the company right now, as reports say that investors have extra reasons to be skeptical.

Some may have heard of how certain tests got landed with exploding NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 dual-chip cards recently.

The BIOS was thought to be the culprit, at least until the Santa Clara, California-based company itself said that was not the problem.

Things are still somewhat up in the air about this, but it looks like the company might be contending with a different sort of problems.

Apparently, its investors are unimpressed with its performance on the smartphone and even the tablet market, despite how many Android 3.0 slates are using the Tegra 2 SoC (system-on-chip).

Reports (or one of them) are actually saying that they are losing confidence, to the point where NVIDIA's share prices fell 3.8 percent.

Speculation about how Motorola's Droid Bionic smartphone might end up being delayed (it uses NVIDIA's Tegra chip) obviously contributed to this turn of events.

Basically, some investors and analysts are not convinced NVIDIA can really compete against Apple on the tablet and smartphone fronts.

On the other hand, there are those that doubt Bionic will even be delayed and, regardless of it, do see quite the potential behind the Tegra, since it uses more advanced manufacturing technologies and is overall better, price and advertising strategy aside.

Analyst Hans Mosesmann is implied to have actually went as far as saying that Apple will only be able to keep its products at the top if it does a major redesign of its processors, since the technology is 'way behind.”

Of course, it remains to be seen if his words are enough to prevent the company's shares from falling even further.