IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 10/10/2009

NVIDIA to halt motherboard chipset development

For quite some time now there has been talk about NVIDIA's chipset business, and more specifically their future plans for it (if any).آ Quite recently, we were told by NVIDIA that we wouldn't be seeing any new chipsets with a discrete graphics focus for the company as they were looking to focus on IGPs (i.e. chipsets with on-board graphics), while continuing to sell their current AMD-capable solutions as before.آ Since then, there has been even more noise and speculation about NVIDIA's chipset business and the possibility of them halting chipset development entirely, and it now appears that this is the case, although the company certainly aren't ruling out a return to this market in the future in the official statement on the matter released yesterday.

There are two key points in this statement.آ First, NVIDIA claims they are continuing to innovate for Intel's platforms where there is a front-side bus involved as that is the one area that without a doubt NVIDIA knows they are permitted to develop for.آ I do know that NVIDIA has just one more chipset planned for this segment, what we essentially know as the ION 2 platform, that is being built pretty much exclusively for a single major OEM - of the fruit variety.آ Surely you didn't think Apple would base almost its entire line of products on a technology without an upgrade path?آ Might we see ION 2 in other platforms like netbooks and component-level products?آ Probably, but ION 2 definitely only has a single target in mind.

If we consider the fact that ION 2 is basically a completed product at this time, with only very minor changes and tweaks being done to suit the OEM in question, then we can rest assured that chipset development at NVIDIA is essentially over - just to reiterate my original point.

PC Perspective has one of the more interesting pieces of analysis about NVIDIA's statement on the future of their chipset business.

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