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Nvidia to quit chipset business

The Asgard

The Asgard

The Asgard

Soldato
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"Nvidia has decided to throw in the towel and quit the chipset business, sources close to the situation at one of Taiwan's top motherboard makers have revealed. As the story is told, Nvidia called a meeting earlier this week with its motherboard partners to gauge support for it continuing to develop chipsets in the future.

The motherboard makers' response? Silence.

It is still early days and not all the facts are known at the time of writing, but it is believed Nvidia will transfer the chipset team to working on GPU projects. On the motherboard makers' side, some makers have already canceled upcoming high-end motherboard projects based on the nForce 7-series chipset.

The loss of its chipset business is expected to have a significant impact on Nvidia's GPU business in the short-term. Reception to the nForce 200 chip (BR04) which will enable SLI technology on Intel X58 motherboards has been lukewarm at best, with many makers saying they will not bother adding the chip on their boards. This means Nvidia needs to find a way of licensing and enabling multi-GPU support on motherboards using Intel and/or AMD chipsets fast. Otherwise it will have to cede the top-end of the graphics card market to AMD, which now has the benefit of Crossfire.

The news would also debunk any recent speculation that Apple will be adopting Nvidia chipsets for its upcoming notebook products. It would be unfortunate if Apple really has poured water on the close relationship it has built with Intel over the past few years, only to have its new best friend exit the market before products are even announced."

http://www.digitimes.com/mobos/a20080801VL203.html
 
Oh they're in a world of hurt right now. Not only are ATI kicking their backsides at the moment but their whole SLI strategy is in disarray.

They may have pioneered the dual-card solution (ignoring 3Dfx for a moment) but they've done little to improve it recently and it now has major flaws compared to Crossfire. Now they've got to eat humble pie and hope Intel are receptive to incorporating SLI support in their chipsets. Even if (and it seems likely) this happens, I doubt Intel can modify their upcoming X58 chipset to cater for SLI and perhaps will have trouble with the generation after that too.

The only other option they'll have to compete at the high-end is to rely on their GX2 solutions but even here they're a poor relation to ATI, still persisting in crudely sticking two boards together rather then integrating multiple GPUs on a single card as ATI are doing.

No sympathy from me whatsoever. NVidia have behaved both arrogantly and naively in recent years and it's now biting them on the backside.
 
Victims of their own greed imo.

There's been a lot of ill feeling over their high-end pricing these last couple of years, and they had a bad habit of releasing hardware without proper software support.

They had almost 2 years and bags of revenue to develop a new untouchable high end GPU platform, and they blew it. G200 is not enough.

They deserve to loose SLi since they took far too long to get it working properly. AMD/ATI should make sure they don't make the same mistakes.

I've enjoyed their products so far, but they've been going down the Creative Labs road imo.

Take the mick out of your customers and they'll take the mick out of you. End of story.
 
This is good, Nvidia motherboards suck anymore for the most part so adding SLi to Intel chipsets is awsome.

Wonder if it will ever be possible to have SLi/Crossfire compatability on the same mobo?
 
Ben M said:
nvidia mobos were always made of fail anyway :p
Click to expand...

They are.


This is how they are shipped

1272549006_294f713d3c.jpg
 
If true this is excellent news.

BTW
I don't believe it is necessary to add SLI support to a Chipset.
Long as you have 2 PCIe slots your good to go.
Of course i stand to be corrected.

I have in the past run 7 series cards on Intel boards with hacked drivers, so this would tend to suggest the restriction is in the NV drivers only.
 
Just YAY!

Hopefully someone will actually make sli viable! and no more of this nonsence of having to buy shoddy boards for sli (wasnt impressed by the 6 serise or even the old nf4's)

Hail commonsence decisions! :D
 
Not so sure this story is really true, or at least it's being vehemently denied by NV

Not so sure this story is really true... or at least it's being vehemently denied, as in this TechReport article (Source: http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/15240)

If you visit DigiTimes right now, you'll see a catchy headline at the top of the page: "Nvidia to quit chipset business." Citing sources at motherboard firms, the Taiwanese site alleges that Nvidia will stop offering chipsets and re-assign its MCP team to the GPU business. Regarding the motive for the change, the site explains, "Nvidia called a meeting earlier this week with its motherboard partners to gauge support for it continuing to develop chipsets in the future. . . . The motherboard makers' response? Silence."

Puzzled, we asked Nvidia Platform Products PR chief Bryan Del Rizzo to weigh in. Del Rizzo's response came swiftly and left little open for interpretation:

  1. The story on Digitimes is completely groundless. We have no intention of getting out of the chipset business.
  2. In fact, our MCP business is as strong as it ever has been for both AMD and Intel platforms:
    - Mercury Research has reported that the NVIDIA market share of AMD platforms in Q2 08 was 60%. We have been steady in this range for over two years.
    - SLI is still the preferred multi-GPU platform thanks to its stellar scaling, game compatibility and driver stability.
    - nForce 790i SLI is the recommended choice by editors worldwide due to its compelling combination of memory performance, overclocking, and support for SLI. . . .
  3. We're looking forward to bring new and very exciting MCP products to the market for both AMD and Intel platforms.
Click to expand...
To add to Nvidia's statement, we remember Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stating in April that customers will find value in Nvidia "motherboard GPUs" once Intel releases Nehalem processors with built-in graphics cores. According to Huang, lengthy processor release cycles will leave plenty of room for quicker and more feature-rich integrated graphics chipsets.
 
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