Is NVIDIA Stopping Chipset Development?

One of the biggest tech rumors of 2009 is the one that has NVIDIA pulling out of the chipset market, and it’s not one that’s going away until it actually happens. The rumor is stronger than ever at this point – so much so, that many don’t even consider it a rumor, but rather absolute fact. How on earth could NVIDIA actually fall to a point that would force them out of the chipset market? Simple, ask Intel.

Due to an ongoing lawsuit, NVIDIA has absolutely no ability to further development on its chipsets based around Intel’s QPI bus. This all boils down to the fact that it’s not in the signed agreement between both companies that NVIDIA is able to create chipsets for future Intel processors. Rather, it is currently locked into development for LGA775 and earlier processor-types only.

NVIDIA is dancing all around the issue, which isn’t helping its case. The company is outright about the fact that it will cease development on chipsets for last-gen processors, but states that its fully-committed to AMD processors and Intel’s processors for which they’re still allowed development (from a forward-thinking standpoint, that’s seemingly only Atom at this point). The problem with these arguments, is that on the AMD side, the market is much smaller than Intel’s right now, so what draw is there to actually further development? There isn’t.

From many different perspectives, NVIDIA is in a very, very difficult spot right now. There doesn’t seem to be a market that it partakes in that hasn’t been shaken up against it, and on the chipset side, the company simply can’t develop for current processors even if they wanted to. Whatever your thoughts on NVIDIA as a company, one thing’s for certain… the lack of competition in any market is not a good thing.

Although the company’s ION has been well-received for the most part, the future of that is even shrouded in doubt. Intel is aggressively developing on-die graphics, and Atom is one day going to be included in the fun. When that happens, ION is going to look even less attractive, because rather than having a CPU and GPU on a motherboard, Intel’s going to pair the two together on the same chip. How’s a CPU-less company to compete with that?

Regardless of how dire the situation is being played out at various media outlets, I don’t think the writing’s on the wall for NVIDIA quite yet. Though I think the company pushes certain technologies a little more than it should, there’s huge potential in its other products, such as the Fermi architecture, both from a GPGPU and gaming standpoint. Though I’m a little skeptical that its upcoming cards are going to wipe the floor with ATI’s latest releases, let’s hope for the sake of real competition that it’s true.