NVIDIA Almost Completely Out of the Chipset Business

It seems that the long-lasting litigation with Intel over rights to make chipsets has finally led to NVIDIA revising its plans, to the point where it has now clearly stated that it is backing out of this market.

NVIDIA made chipsets for processors from AMD and Intel for some years before Intel files charges stating that its most recent processors do not fall under the licensing agreement.

That legal action put NVIDIA's chipset business on hold for quite some time, until the company was far enough behind in that area for recovery to be more than a little unlikely.

On the other hand, the ARM architecture began to be used in a variety of products besides mobile phones, such as tablets.

Knowing an opportunity when it sees one, NVIDIA began its Tegra line, and while the first system-on-chip was not overly widespread, the recent Tegra 2 SoC seems to have made it into quite a few slates and other electronics.

Then, earlier this year, NVIDIA performed some internal changes and merged the core-logic team with the Tegra team, to strengthen the latter and not waste any resources.

Now, it is revealed that NVIDIA made it quite clear that its core-logic research and development efforts have come to a close, although its existing chipsets will continue to sell for as long as customers intend to keep using them.

"We are not building any more chipsets, we are building SoCs now. We are building Tegra SoCs, and so we are going to take integration to a new level,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia.

“The chipset business [has] not grown largely this year because we have not really been expanding the sales of it," he added.

"On the AMD side, our AMD chipset remains quite well positioned. My sense is that our chipset there will continue to ship throughout next year," Mr. Huang went on saying.