What’s Up with Nvidia?

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The PC Core Logic Dead End

Nvidia has also made some important forays into the chipset business. But the PC core logic business turned out to be somewhat fickle over the long run. Intel turned out to be a little prickly to work with (surprise, surprise), and put the licensing brakes on Nvidia’s attempts to develop chipsets for the new Nehalem product line.

AMD’s acquisition of ATI not only got AMD into the graphics business, but also got them into the chipset business. You could argue, with some merit, that Nvidia’s AMD chipsets were better than ATI’s, but that still put a damper on the whole affair. Plus, Nvidia couldn’t charge the premiums they wanted for AMD chipsets as the Athlon and Phenom CPU lines became performance also-rans.

It’s unfortunate that Nvidia’s PC core logic business has hit a wall. The company had invested in some cool initiatives, including ESA (enthusiast system architecture). Had ESA become more mainstream, we might see something different than the multitude of approaches for hardware management we see with today’s motherboards.

Nvidia’s answer to all this is Ion – a chipset designed for Intel’s Atom processor. This can only be a short term band-aid, though. As the Atom processor transitions to Intel’s Moorestown CPU line, the memory controller and graphics functionality transition to the CPU die, which could leave Nvidia out in the cold once again. Plus, there have been questions about the viability of the existing Ion platform due to pricing concerns.

There have been some important rays of sunshine in all the gloom, however. Despite the pricing concerns, it’s looking like Ion will be picked up by a number of OEMs, including Lenovo and Samsung. The Tegra line of system-on-chip for mobile platforms got a huge shot in the arm with the design win in the upcoming release of Microsoft’s very cool looking Zune HD. The Tegra line will likely see some other key design wins in the near future.

Still, it’s an odd place for Nvidia to be. The company’s marketing strategy once revolved around putting out high end products that offered either better performance or a more robust feature set than competitors – or both, in some cases. Then the company would push the new tech down into the mainstream and low end.

Now, their key successes seem to revolve around high volume, low margin products.