NVIDIA Suspends Chipset Development

Oct 12, 2009

NVIDIA is temporarily suspending its chipset and CPU business until it settles matters with rival Intel. Its GeForce 9400M and ION brands will not be effected.

As Ars Technica reports, NVIDIA is putting its chipset and CPU production temporarily on ice. Officially NVIDIA says that its integrated solution "has a long healthy life ahead," but their ongoing patent dispute with Intel has proved too much for them, forcing them into postponement mode. Intel, for one thing, claims that NVIDIA is not licensed for the new DMI bus. Until this and other Intel claims are cleared up, NVIDIA will put no more investment into their chipset production. That the chipmaker has been running into a wall with its CPU production has also long been suspected.

However, Ars Technica believes that business reasons accompany the legal ones. NVIDIA is also likely to withdraw its joint chipset production with AMD. Linux has supported most NVIDIA chipsets flawlessly over the last few years, with only some initial glitches and problems with very specialized motherboards. Unlike with graphics cards, free drivers for these chipsets were pretty much always available.

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