These days, NVIDIA is almost constantly in the news, but not because it necessarily has something to brag about. It seems rather unfortunate that today's current leading graphics manufacturer is faced with so many things that it has to deal with. As we told you last week, the company had to cope with an impressive drop in market shares, after it announced that a number of its mobile graphics chips were defective. Moreover, the company's GT200-series graphics cards are currently being sold for less than what NVIDIA first announced.

With all that, to add insult to injury, it also seems that low market shares and even lower price tags aren't the only bad things that make it in the news and that we can read about these days. Rumor has it that the Santa-Clara based graphics manufacturer is using its alliance with VIA in order to get to competitor Intel. Unnamed sources cited by Digitimes are claiming that NVIDIA isn't doing right by VIA and is only in it for a negotiation with Intel.

NVIDIA's interest for Intel has a lot to do with the latter's recently announced Atom processor. Apparently, sources whisper, NVIDIA seeks to manufacture Atom-ready chipsets, for which it needs Intel's support and acceptance. Word on the street is that this is the only reason for which NVIDIA joined forces with VIA in the first place, although the official line was that the companies will go corporate in the low-cost PC and MID market.

These rumors haven't been confirmed by either of the companies' representatives but, if true, once Intel agrees to allow NVIDIA's chipset to support the Atom CPU, NVIDIA will most probably ditch Taiwan-based chipset manufacturers VIA and Silicon Integrated System (SiS).

This is not the only dispute between the two giant companies. One month ago, NVIDIA's Derek Perez stated that Intel would not allow the "green company" to make nForce chipsets with support for Intel's Nehalem CPUs. If this too turns out to be true, it will most certainly not benefit NVIDIA one bit, as it stands to lose a considerable market share, especially when these new Nehalems do come out eventually.