14 DAY TRIAL // Many things have been written about NVIDIA, the former leading manufacturer of computer graphics, not going through the best of periods yet. Ever since the green company first reported that a number of its mobile graphics chips could potentially fail, it virtually got to learn the meaning of “when it rains, it pours.” The latest reports are not that good either.
Earlier this year, several rumors indicated that two of the company's major partners, EVGA and XFX, were about to leave the Santa Clara, California-based graphics chip maker, thus putting an end to their GeForce-based lineup of graphics cards. According to a recent development on that story, it now appears that NVIDIA will abandon five of its partners, which only raises more questions as to how well it is handling the fact that it has lost the leading position in the high-end graphics card market.
A recent article on the Inquirer says that two of the five partners are Foxconn and Club 3D, while the remaining three are still not known. Among the many reported reasons for NVIDIA leaving five of its partners is the fact that GeForce cards are generally overpriced and aren't doing all that good in the performance department, compared with their competitors from ATI. This is actually the main cause for which NVIDIA's current business plan can't support all of its 24 partners.
The exact details of the separation between NVIDIA and the reported five partners are still sketchy, but it seems that the departures will take place on nothing but friendly terms. Unfortunately, for the time being, no official confirmation of such actions has been made, either by NVIDIA or any of the five partners, but the general belief is that several more partners will suffer the same fate and leave the company in the next few months.
In the meantime, NVIDIA is hard at work trying to bring forward its next-generation graphics cards, which will also debut a new naming scheme.