nVidia's Chipsets Business Under Siege - Page 2

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Systems and hobbyist Web site Fudzilla said that Drew Henry, senior director of platform products at nVidia, told the site that since AMD's CPU business is doing so badly and since its market shrunk so much, "it is simply not economically viable for Nvidia to continue developing chipsets for AMD. They simply cannot make enough money."

nVidia optimistic, analysts confused

However, an nVidia spokesperson said that's not the case. "On AMD platforms, we continue to sell a higher quantity of chipsets than AMD itself … We expect our MCP business for both Intel and AMD to be strong well into the future," he said in an e-mail to InternetNews.com.

What leaves both analysts confused is why nVidia is fighting for a market that is clearly going away. Granted that is $1 billion in revenue and you don't just toss that away, but the strategies of AMD and Intel will clearly leave no room for any chipsets in the coming years, nVidia's or their own. It's like fighting to keep the floppy disk market alive.

"Both Intel and AMD are focusing on highly-integrated processors and it's eroding the traditional chipset market," said McCarron. "Where we are now with Nehalem, there's still a chipset to handle I/O. When that gets integrated, then the chipset goes away. There are compelling reasons not to integrate everything, but the history of PCs is integration."

Brookwood adds "I've been saying for a year the chipset business is history. That's not news. It's just that it's starting to play out now. The only thing the judge [in the Intel case] can do is overrule Moore's Law, and I don't know any judges that have done that lately," he said.

"It's not a legal issue in my book. From my perspective, this is technology marching on and causing a shift in the definition of markets," added Brookwood.