Directory  Articles Opinions/Editorials |
| Nvidia's Meltdown? |
|
|
|
| Saturday, 02 August 2008 | |
|
Page 3 of 5 The State Of The Chipset Business...Dead? Though the G84/G86 platform are essentially end-of-life parts at this stage, it may be true that the timing here couldn't be worse for nVidia when it comes to their future development efforts. The G84/G86 debacle has led to and probably will continue to lead to lost mobile platform contracts for nVidia. Also, there are significant sirens going off that nVidia may be exiting the chipset market altogether. From Digitimes... "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."  Even if the above Digitimes story is either misguided or wrong, it is no secret that nVidia has been plagued with issues regarding their high end 790i platform, somewhat reminiscent of similar issues experienced with their 780i and 680i platforms. The 7xx chipset adoption rate is low, with some vendors dropping high end 790i products altogether quite suddenly. Foxconn has apparently pulled development on its much anticipated Dreadnought 790i board, despite much fanfare about the board earlier this year. The same can be said with mysteriously vanishing examples from DFI, Gigabyte, and other motherboard makers. The upcoming Tylersburg chipset for Intel's Nehalem platform will have SLI support, but only if x58 boards are also outfitted with an Nforce 200 SLI chip. nVidia has no license to make chipsets on Intel's new Nehalem platform, so this is as much as nVidia can do to get their presence into Intel's future motherboard platforms as things currently stand. From what we're seeing from board vendors on this matter, few are happy with the compromises thermally and electrically from supporting this scenario. nVidia's main competitor AMD, has no such barrier to support its competing Crossfire technology. |