CEO Points The Finger At Intel As Nvidia Withdraws From PC Chips

Posted 09/09/2011 at 11:05am | by Brad Chacos

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It’s not a big secret that Nvidia’s has been slowly pulling out of the PC chipset market for a while now: a quick Google search shows results for “Nvidia exit chipset business” as far back as 2008. Some people thought that the company would get back into the swing of things after signing a patent cross-licensing agreement with Intel back in January, ending a long and bitter legal battle. Nope, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told a group of investors this week. Nvidia’s done with PC chipsets for good, and Intel’s the one to blame.

"We've been exiting that business for quite a famous reason, because of a dispute with Intel. They preferred that we weren't in that business," Huang said at the Kaufman Brothers Investor Conference this week. "Although it was a large business opportunity for us, staying in it was really impossible considering their displeasure for it."

Computerworld reports that the company plans on circling the wagons around the mobile chip and graphics card segments of its business. Nvidia’s Tegra line has proven a smash hit with mobile devices, and the new quad-core Kal-El is due to roll into tablets by the end of the year. The company also wants to gain more penetration with its GPUs in the server and supercomputer fields.

Nvidia still plans on working with Intel in its quest to develop more powerful graphics solutions for PC users, but has no plans on moving back into computer chipsets whatsoever. "We're going to stay out of the basic PC market, we're not going to compete with Intel," Huang said.