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Site says Nvidia will exit chipset biz, Nvidia denies
by Cyril Kowaliski — 12:02 PM on August 1, 2008

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:
   1. 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.
   2. SLI is still the preferred multi-GPU platform thanks to its stellar scaling, game compatibility and driver stability.
   3. 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.

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. 

Tags: Motherboards Chipsets