Intel pushing NVIDIA out of the chipset market?

Posted on Wednesday, June 04 2008 @ 22:37 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck

The relationship between Intel and NVIDIA isn't as good as it used to be. We already heard NVIDIA is having a lot of trouble getting a license from Intel to make chipsets for the Nehalem processor but now FUD Zilla claims it's more than this. They heard from NVIDIA PR director Derek Perez that Intel won't let NVIDIA make Nehalem compatible chipsets, even though NVIDIA has a legitimate license, and that Intel is playing the game very dirty by trying to push NVIDIA out of the chipset market.

We all know that Jensen, Nvidia’s CEO, officially stated that Intel stepped over the edge with its comments about Nvidia. Ever since Nvidia entered the chipset license with Intel, Graphzilla was concerned with Intel's history of competing, and they would be naive not to.

If you are old enough, you will remember that Intel killed VIA’s Pentium chipset business even though VIA had a legitimate license. Intel was cool towards Nvidia until recently, up until the point when Intel realized that graphics card might be used for more than gaming and after Nvidia’s bold decision to keep the SLI for itself. It was a tough decision to go against Intel but if Intel got the SLI for its X58 chipset or any previous Intel’s chipset, business will be good as dead, or things would get much tougher then they are.

At this point Intel simply doesn’t want to honour its commitments toward he chipset license deal.

Nvidia has confirmed that it is officially becoming a victim of what VIA, AMD and many other companies have felt for a long time, as Intel tends to repress competition when threatened by superior products and technologies.

If all this information is correct it looks like we can expect another interesting legal battle..

About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.

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Re: Intel pushing NVIDIA out of the chipset market?
by Anonymous on Thursday, June 05 2008 @ 4:13 CEST

Nvidia has sold chipsets, without paying a dime to do so, for what, almost 3/4 of a decade now? How many millions in profit is that? Several socket changes later, and all the while competing with Intel's business. Intel was even forced to continue allowing overclocking because its competitor was offering such a feature. All Nvidia wanted was a chance to compete, but it did so for FREE.

Now the shoe drops and it's Nvidia's turn to allow SLI to work on Intel chipsets. Yes that would create competition for Nvidia's chipsets, force them to be better, to compete for customers. Intel didn't really expect trouble. In fact a year or so ago, hacked drivers allowed SLI to work on Intel chipsets so it was all technically possible. Then came the request for a payment arrangement. Intel was pretty surprised. Here, after years of allowing a competitor to thrive, to take away their own market without cost, said competitor comes along and offers to kindly charge for enabling a connectivity feature.

So Intel gave the first warning sign, and the new quads didn't work on older Nvidia chipsets. Nvidia still feels it should be the only one getting paid here.

Now along comes Nehalem. And the deal is simple even the Jensen can probably read it. If Nvidia feels they have no need of using Intel cpu's then they can feel free to go their own way. If not, then it's a simple trade, SLI for access to the new Nehalem sockets.

Realistically Nehalem only has to exist for 1 year and the Larrabee will provide more GPU power than quad SLI GT200's. So Nehalem users aren't really all that concerned. The question for Nvidia is whether they want to have any business at all in 1 year. If they can't sell chipsets to the Intel side of things, and Larrabee eats heavily (to put it mildly) into their GPU business, how much do you think Nvidia stock will be worth? Not much.

Jensen is all fire and not a whole lot of brains. He and Yahoo seem to be thinking alike, both idiots in a modern world. Nvidia loves being the bully. Look at ATI. And they certainly haven't considered playing "fair" in the GPU wars over the years. But now they are going to wave their business goodbye because they are greedy. And in that process, much like Yahoo, they will toss their entire business into the can.

You couldn't pay for this kind of entertainment.

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