Nvidia CEO: We're Done with Chipsets
PrintOne thing we appreciate about Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang is that he typically doesn't pull any punches. Rather than dance around marketing speak and typical PR rhetoric, the outspoken CEO gets straight to the point, oftentimes in a very candid manner. More recently, Huang got on the topic of chipsets, seemingly putting an official end to that part of Nvidia's business, Xbit Labs reports.
"We are not building any more chipsets, we are building SoCs now. We are building Tegra SoCs, and so we are going to take integration to a new level... The chipset business [has] not grown largely this year because we have not really been expanding the sales of it," Huang said.
Although Nvidia isn't building new chipsets, the GPU maker does intend to continue shippings its current products well into 2011.
"On the AMD side, our AMD chipset remains quite well positioned. My sense is that our chipset there will continue to ship throughout next year. The second thing is the MCP89, the latest and the last generation of Intel chipset that we built was just a really wonderful piece of engineering and the work that we did with Apple was great, and they are going to continue to use that for some time. So, I think that the tail off is just going to take a little longer than people expected. But I do not know exactly how long," Huang added.
None of this is really surprising, considering Intel essentially put the kibosh on a large part of Nvidia's chipset business. Prior to Nehalem, Nvidia was producing chipsets for Intel processors as part of a licensing agreement between the two firms, but Intel's stance is that the license only covers chips that don't contain an integrated memory controller.
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xeridian
November 16, 2010 at 3:30am
Great day for AMD!!! YAY!!!! I guess they are trying to act as though they are ahead of AMD's Fusion Family combo chips. Technology takes baby steps for a reason. They better hope whatever they do they have foresight enough that they can reverse engineer any mistakes along the way. Also forcing Manufacturers to adapt to early can be a bad thing...
Also, I'd like to add, Nvidia makes $2 billion less in revenue and is on the Down while AMD is on the Up. Guess you shouldn't have left AMD after all Mr. Huang
Funny thing is, all the negatives against ATI that are using Nvidia Chipsets are all using AMD Processors.
AMD is dropping the ATI name, and starting a sub SoC type setup minus the chipset. Doing it the way manufacturers would want; to combine the GPU and CPU first, then the NB and SB, then once that is perfected combine them all. Hence why Nvidia is targeting smaller platforms. A much smaller and more simple design, where as AMD will own the PC market and probably have more say with intel and Apple over time eventually being a monster for Nvidia to over come.
They are doing the smart thing however, dropping a thorn in their side and using all their recources to beat AMD to at least one major punch. Where the middle is, I couldn't tell you, but for Media/game/film designers/creators and gamers alike, this is actually wonderfull news.
Lhot
November 15, 2010 at 2:51pm
...NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!!
nVidia, ya just gotta make chipsets, ya just gotta ! Noone else does it "just the way you do it"....stay away nightmares...stay away! I even save dead motherboards, if they have nVidia chipsets.
To be honest though, nVidia quit making 'GOD' chipsets after the 590SLI, sure it only supported PCI-E 1.0, but that chipset on an ASUS M2N32 SLI Deluxe motherboard is STILL running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (B.E.) Brisbane 2.6GHz Dual-Core (Overclocked to 3.2Ghz) since the day they were both 1st available...24/7...on air cooling too.
This is a sign, an omen....2012 WILL be the apocalypse and nVidia will have started the ball rolling. Oh how the mighty have fallen, this is a sad day and even sadder news.
This just goes to prove what I've been saying all along...Intel IS the antichrist and doomsday is upon us.
SoC is a BAD idea, a very BAD idea....didn't grandma always say: Don't put all your eggs in one basket sonny. Someone needs to go wake up the FTC and disband Intel before it's too late ^^
BAMT
November 15, 2010 at 5:38pm
The 790i is a great board, too. I've been running a Q6600 on it at 3.2GHz+ on air cooling since I set it up. Not to mention is has three PCIe 16x slots, two to the MCP and one to the southbridge, and supports DDR3 in the 2200MHz+ range.
At any rate, I agree, they need to keep making kick-ass chipsets. Intel's are decent I suppose, but I've had bad experiences with both their P35 and P45 boards in both performance and reliability. (Old Intel boards like ICH7 have been rock solid for me but lack overclocking features.)
Wareagle
November 15, 2010 at 11:30am
So how is this going to work with SLI on AMD platforms (or Intel, for that matter)?
WWNSX
November 15, 2010 at 1:35pm
Since people have figured out a way to get SLI to work on non-nvidia certifed chipsets maybe they'll just license SLI as a Chip but most likely as a Driver. I hope so because I really don't want to buy ATi and deal with their crap drivers.
I think Nvidia is fooling themselves if they expect their 980a chipsets which are rehashed 780a chipsets to sell well in 2011 with no USB 3.0 and SATA III support; especially if they tell motherboard makers to add those on with no actual support or testing to see how well it works.
This really sucks though as i've always felt that the nForce Chipsets have always been better then what Intel or AMD offered and have always gone AMD CPU > Nvidia Chipset > Nvidia GPU Since the nForce 2 chipset came out. sure they've had issues at time but I've always stuck it out. Too bad they went out with a whimper and not a Bang.
This will most likely erode their user base in the long term and possibly just screw them over.
Good Job on fucking shit up Nvidia at least you're still good at that.
Eoraptor
November 15, 2010 at 1:50pm
Yeah, no kidding. I'm still rockin an Nforce 2 Athlon XP as the household computer, and its dual channel and wide PCI bus don't even blink at Windows 7 (if only it were multi-core)
granted, the last two iterations of Nforce have kinda sucked, but that's nothing that couldn't be fixed with a little TLC by nvidia. if anything, they should be EXPANDING their chipset biz to take advantage of the booming laptop and tablet markets, not trying to shove their dicks more into smarter-than-you phones.
compro01
November 15, 2010 at 2:56pm
That IS what they're doing. Their Tegra SoC is being used in several andoird-based tablets.
Peanut Fox
November 15, 2010 at 12:26pm
The same way it has been working. There aren't any chipsets on Intel's current 1366 and 1156 sockets, and SLI is still available.
Synux
November 15, 2010 at 10:21am
Please forgive my ignorance but I do not understand how this will improve things. By moving to SoC with things be faster or cheaper or more energy efficient? The post from which this article is derived - and by "derived" I mean copy/paste - is not specific on this either. Please tell us why this matters.
compro01
November 15, 2010 at 10:58am
They're moving out of the desktop chipset market and instead focusing on the SoC (System on (a) Chip. Basically, a CPU, GPU, northbridge, southbridge, and memory controller all in a single chip.) market, for stuff like smartphones, tablets, multimedia players, etc. SoCs are not for desktop use.
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