14 DAY TRIAL // Most recent reports on NVIDIA seem to indicate that the Santa Clara chip maker is far from doing well. All of the company's business sections have to deal with one or another significant issue and, from the looks of it, all of them will most likely leave their mark on the company's overall performance. So much so that, according to rumors in the industry, the green company is expected to announce the end of its chipset business.
As most of you might already be aware, these past weeks, NVIDIA has had to deal with quite a few significant problems. Its graphics segment failed to rise to the expectations, as AMD managed to come up with a better graphics card, which, in turn, prompted NVIDIA to lower the prices for the latest high-end GT200-series cards.
The company's notebook GPU business was also in the spotlight for a while, after an announcement was made according to which a number of NVIDIA's chips had significant issues that would result in system failure. Until now, only notebooks sold by Dell and HP have been reported with such problems.
On top of all this, Digitimes reports that NVIDIA is considering quitting the chipset business. According to the source, earlier this week, the green company called a meeting with all its motherboard partners, in order to ask for support that would allow it to continue with the development of its chipsets in the future. Insiders reporting to Digitimes claim that there was no response from the motherboard makers, which would certainly leave NVIDIA in a rather undesirable situation. Furthermore, Digitimes reports that some of the motherboard makers have already canceled upcoming high-end mobos based on the nForce 7-series chipset.
The news isn't yet confirmed and it is still too early to determine whether NVIDIA is indeed going to transfer its chipset team to GPU projects. But, if it does, this will most certainly take its toll on the company's overall business as it will not be able to provide users with support for the latest high-end technologies in the computer market.
On the other hand, if NVIDIA is really considering terminating its chipset business, we might be seeing better days for its competitors, which are close to revealing some important products, such as is Intel's Larrabee and AMD's high-end R700 graphics chip (also known as Radeon HD 4870 X2).