NVIDIA Denies Exit from Chipset Business

• Author: admin
• Filed under: Tech News
• Date: Aug 1,2008

A report issued early Friday morning claimed that NVIDIA was leaving the chipset business. The report, issued by the usually quite reputable (and accurate) Digitimes, said the following:

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.

However, NVIDIA sent an email statement to media, including yours truly, strongly denying the assertions.

The story on Digitimes is completely groundless. We have no intention of getting out of the chipset business.

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. In fact, a recent article on Tom’s Hardware recently came to the same conclusion: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/NVIDIA-790i-SLI,1977-29.html

We’re looking forward to bring new and very exciting MCP products to the market for both AMD and Intel platforms.

The chipset business accounts for 17%-18% of Nvidia’s revenues, so it really didn’t make sense as a move. Additionally, there aer rumors that Apple is considering NVIDIA chipsets for its newest line of Macbooks.

According to CRN, NVIDIA has requested a full retraction of the Digitimes story.