NVidia Reportedly Will Exit Chipset Business 173
xav_jones sends along a story from X bit Laboratories claiming that NVidia is ready to quit making chipsets. That story links one from DigiTimes, which reports that NVidia has denied that it's getting out of the business. "[NVidia] is about to quit chipset business, which automatically means that the company's much-hyped multi-GPU SLI technology is either in danger or re-considered. Moreover, several mainboard makers have already ceased making high-end NVidia-based mainboards. [NVidia has]... reportedly decided to quit core-logic business to concentrate on development of graphics processors and following failure to secure license to build and sell chipsets compatible with Intel Corp.'s microprocessors that use Quick-Path Interconnect bus."
Re:AMD / ATI chipsets are good on board with ram (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Nvidia Says: Bullshit; Chipset Business Strong (Score:1, Interesting)
The only thing that grates on me with nVidia chipsets is that for some reason they felt compelled to design yet another Ethernet controller of their very own, instead of just cloning an existing design. Ethernet controllers seem to be proliferating while every other technology is converging on a handful of core chips. I've never understood why.
Nforce was great (Score:4, Interesting)
I really like the Nforce chipset.
In my experience they have always been stable and well supported.
Where does this leave us AMD users... I'm still not quite the fan of the AMD chipsets as they haven't been around long enough... all of the "performance" boards were Nvidia based. My current board has an Nforce 570.
How does the AMD 780 compare? Anyone?
Re:Open SLI (Score:3, Interesting)
Ties between chipset and CPU (Score:3, Interesting)
Although this story seems groundless, it does look like the ties between CPU and chip set are getting stronger. This seems to be one of the reasons for ATI to be taken over by AMD. Intel was already creating its own chip sets and has a monopoly on defining an interface between the two. This is an interesting relationship since it would seem that the CPU is only part of the machine nowadays. I'm expecting that this relationship will turn around somewhere in the distant future.
With Intel it was always hard to sell your own chip set against theirs (for the desktop market). Now it will get harder with AMD as well, since they have the ATI chip sets to think about. It would be strange if there would not be some casualties. Hopefully nVidia is big enough to keep some chip sets around for some time. VIA has already given up, I hope their gamble on the embedded market pays off, although they will have pretty strong competition there as well.
Re:Damn (Score:3, Interesting)
nice features (such a firewall built directly into the NIC)
Actually, NAM can be very buggy. My system had never been really stable when it was installed; for example, I wasn't able to install a game without getting a BSOD. Just playing music in Winamp with nothing else open would crash my computer at times as well.
It appears this story is bogus (Score:5, Interesting)
Link [google.com]
Re:Ties between chipset and CPU (Score:5, Interesting)
Notice the odd one out? What do you think the logical long-term plan should be, if you were nVidia?
Re:Nforce was great (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't have a 780 chipset myself, I have a 790, but I figure this ought to be just as relevant. I felt the same way when I built my latest machine back in February. I didn't want to go with an AMD chipset and ATI cards. I've been an ardent AMD fan for CPUs, but for the last two builds, I went from ATI to nVidia for graphics...
Of course, when I looked into it, it turned out that the latest ATI offerings beat the pants off of nVidia's, and the new CrossfireX SLI system looked like they took nVidia SLI, and changed everything that was wrong with it. Besides, there were no decent nVidia-based mobos that could socket a Phenom that I could find at the time. So I went with an AMD-based quad CrossfireX motherboard from ASUS (The M3A32-MVP Deluxe), and slapped a Phenom, 8gb of RAM, and a Radeon HD 3850 in it. (I later added a second 3850...technically I can still put two more in, too!)
I barely missed dual-NICs, the thing that got me most, was the lack of RAID5 support on the SATA chips... (Though I still haven't been in a position to need it.) As far as performance, it's been rock solid for me. My nVidia-based machine crashed and hung a hell of a lot more when gaming. As it is, I know this one HAS, but I can't clearly recall any one time. Even the onboard audio, despite being the same chip as my last nVidia machine, doesn't have the problems my old machine did. (Some audio samples being replaced with static and screeching in certain games.)
It's not all fun and games though, I also use the machine for graphics work. When I first put it together, I tested my passive CPU cooling setup by running an unbiased render of a complex scene in Fryrender for roughly 72 hours, keeping the cores maxed the whole time... Solid as a rock, AND never went above 41 degrees C. (Spent most of the time at 38C, when I wasn't heating up the apartment making dinner.)
So, all things considered, I'd say they make a damn good chipset. :D
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If only (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Damn (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't have much experience with ATI chipsets but what I can say about nvidia's chipsets is that they're usually HOT and consume a lot of power.
I have an Asus mainboard with an Nforce2 chipset, it was great, with a great onboard soundcard (Soundstorm). Now, nVidia won't use a good soundcard anymore, to make their chips cheaper.
Now, I have an Asus mainboard with the Nforce4-SLI chipset... you can make eggs on it, that's how hot it is (see the P5ND2-SLI motherboard on google if you want). It's good, it's stable otherwise but nothing special.
Speaking about video cards...
Two or three years ago I had a Gigabyte Radeon 9200.
Gave it to my brother and bought an Asus nVidia 6600.
Now, I bought a Sapphire Radeon 4850.
What I can say is... maybe you don't realize it, because you have a LCD monitor, but me, with a 21" CRT monitor running at 1280x960, 100Hz... can definitely notice the improved 2D quality of the Radeon cards, compared to nVidia.
On nVidia cards the image is very slightly blurry.
ATI video cards are great, so are nVIDIA. On 2D ATI wins for sure, on 3D I don't know what to say.
The only thing I notice on 3D is that when a very new game is just released, some games have issues with ATI cards, which are (even when I had the Radeon 9200 was the same) solved in a week or so with the next video driver. Other than this minor inconvenience, I never really had problems with either ATI or nVidia.
The word in the silicon valley... (Score:4, Interesting)
...is that NVidia is working on an Intel-compatible CPU.
My speculation:
They're probably shuffling resources internally, Their chipset designers might be working on the chipset to interface with their CPU.
You haven't heard this from me ;)
Re:The right thing to do... (Score:4, Interesting)
Simple: resources put to developing the chipsets are resources that are not being put to developing GPUs. I work for a company that up until a year and a half or so ago had a single product, which had then and has now the largest market share among vendors in that market. Then we launched a new product in a complementary market sector in which there is a dominant player. Sure, we hired new staff to work on this product and it has gained considerable traction in the last nine months and the dominant player in that market is probably starting to sweat :) However, some staff from our existing product line also moved onto that new product line and while development has continued on our core product and new features continue to be released and we continue to be number one in that market, we could have done more, faster if we were focusing on a single product line.
That doesn't mean nv was wrong to get into the chipset business. Certainly, my employer was not wrong to enter the complementary market sector we entered. Sales are going very well and there are great cross-sell opportunities between our two product lines. I can see us becoming the dominant player in this new market. However, that doesn't mean that entering a new market will not have an effect on your existing products, especially in the short term. I assure you it does.
The problem nv has in the chipset market, as I see it, is that they entered a very crowded market with a dominant player (Intel), which didn't really need another player, and they put themselves in direct competition with Intel, something they weren't when they only made GPUs. It got more complicated when AMD bought ATI, since that also put them in direct competition with AMD. If nv were to exit the chipset business they could make nice with Intel as a hedge against AMD. Thus, exiting the chipset business, even if they are profitable in it, could make business sense.
Sure, they deny it. Of course, a lot of these sorts of denied stories later turn out to mostly or wholly true. Time will tell, but I shan't be surprised if we see an announcement from nv in 3 months that they are leaving the chipset business. Who knows? They might even be able to sell some of their IP to Intel and recover some of their initial investment.
Re:Ties between chipset and CPU (Score:4, Interesting)
Via CPUs are crap, VIA chipsets are extra crap, and VIA video blows chunks.
nVidia have stuck to the things they do well.
Re:AMD / ATI chipsets are good on board with ram (Score:3, Interesting)
You could connect memory to be used ONLY by the video card on a special slot - it was used for laptops, I think. Also, if I remember correctly, Intel had an option to add a special card with RAM in the AGP port, and the chipset would use it as video memory.
This was used as the video part of the chipset can use more memory bandwidth than the main RAM allows it, and using integrated graphics with main memory lowers the available bandwidth to the processor.
Re:Damn (Score:3, Interesting)
Well I think that I'm about to get called a troll but I've owned several systems over the last few years. Some have had nforce chipssets and others a mixture of AMD, Intel, and VIA. When I setdown and think about the systems that I have had the most trouble out of have nforce chipsets.
My current system has a AMD chipset in it and it has been the most stable and trouble free system I've. I bought two systems a few years ago. One for a linux server and the other for a HTPC. The linux server was a VIA / Bisostar system and the other was a Suttle nforce3. The biostar is now living in my sons room as a game machine and the shuttle is still a htpc. There has never been an issue with the biostar. But the shuttle has been the most troublesome system I've had. I've replaced everything in it from the graphics card, memory, cpu, and the PS and it still every 6 months eats itself. Last night the screen turned blue and it scragged the OS.
The system I had before this one was a Nforce4 and it had issues. Sometimes I had to cycle the power a couple of times to get it to boot. Once it was up it would run fine for months but would do some strange things.
I've know other people with nforce chipsets that have had no issues with them. But I do find it interesting that I do.