NVIDIA worst performer in Nasdaq 100

BusinessWeek notes NVIDIA is the worst performer in the Nasdaq 100 as the company's shares have plunged 44 percent since the beginning of the year. The company hasn't seen a lot of luck in recent years, as it got plagued by a string of bad news, including issues with defective GPUs, lawsuits, the decline of its chipset business, lackluster graphics cards, increased competition from AMD and a bad bet in mobile sector.

The drop in the company's stock hasn't dented the confidence of Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who says his graphics chips are on the rise. In April the Taiwan-born founder of the company told analysts that the "vast majority of the world" recognizes Nvidia as a "world leader in visual computing." Such statements don't always help him in the eyes of investors, says Hans Mosesmann, an analyst at Raymond James.

Nvidia's main business is designing high-end computer chips that process the movie-like images in computer games. This year the Santa Clara (Calif.) company introduced Fermi, which promised game designers more processing power. "It's the most forward-looking architecture out there by far," says Dan Vivoli, Nvidia's senior vice-president for marketing. Forward-looking, but not on time: The $200, consumer-oriented version of the chip debuted only last week, six months later than originally planned.