Neowin.net

Nvidia has released an official statement refuting the recent story claiming that the company is planning to quit its chipset business. Michael Jong, senior director of corporate marketing for Nvidia indicated that Nvidia has no intention of getting out of the chipset business and that the report is completely groundless.

But according to The Inquirer, DigiTimes got its facts correct.

Just over a week ago, Nvidia's maximum leader, Jen-Hsun Huang, held a meeting with Taiwanese mobo partners. He directly asked them if there was a reason why Nvidia should stay in the chipset business. You could hear the crickets chirp.

In mainland China. No one came up with a reason, so the division was officially killed, and the teams will be rolled into GPU projects.

The INQUIRER has talked to people who were at the meeting, and they confirmed the reports, and are dead convnced that Nvidia chipsets are a thing of the past.

What’s your take on the rumours? Are Nvidia going the way of Via? Or do you think the best is yet to come from Nvidia's chipset division?

This rumour seems to be hanging around the neck of Nvidia due to the performance of its chipsets over the last few quarters.

Both its 780i/790i chipset have underperformed and in a lot of cases suffered from bugs and overheating.
Its NV200 SLI bridge chip for the Intel X58 has also been slated by critics for being more akin to PCIe Gen1 than a true implementation of PCIe 2 while adding higher latency to the process.

It’s also rumoured that Nvidia had to go cap-in-hand just to get a licence for Intel’s X58, without the licence it would have been game-over for Nvidia.

So the overall feeling is that Nvidia will continue while it has inventory, and chips worth selling. But with top tier motherboard makers shying away from the X58 + SLI configuration and nothing much on the roadmap after the 790i chipset, Nvidia may be trying to save-face and gently slip away from the chipset arena not through choice but by lack of OEM & Consumer demand.