FPSLabs : NVIDIA’s woes continue

Posted by Thomas Gribble in August 5th, 2008

Clearly this whole G84 and G86 fiasco is pretty bad news for NVIDIA. If recent reports are to be believed, the problem is far more widespread than even the Inquirer initially believed. Not only are all GeForce 8600 and 8400/8500 parts affected by the weak substrate issues, but members of the mobile GeForce Go 6000 and 7000 series might be as well. NVIDIA has set aside $150 to $200 million dollars for this problem, which not only will probably not be enough, but leads us to believe they have known about their mistake for a quite a while.

To add insult to industry, new reports have been circulating that NVIDIA will soon be exiting the chipset business. This report originated at Digitimes, and NVIDIA’s Brian Del Rizzo was quick to offer a response to the report saying that, “The story on Digitimes is completely groundless. We have no intention of getting out of the chipset business,” on ExtremeTech. The statement goes on to quote various statistics that aim to show NVIDIA’s success in the chipset business. According to DailyTech, those statistics are:

Mercury Research has reported that the NVIDIA market share of AMD platforms in Q2 08 was 60%. We have been steady in this range for over two years.
SLI is still the preferred multi-GPU platform thanks to its stellar scaling, game compatibility and driver stability.
nForce 790i SLI is the recommended choice by editors worldwide due to its compelling combination of memory performance, overclocking, and support for SLI.

While it is true that NVIDIA’s nForce 790i platform is one of the most heralded products the company has produced recently, the statement does not address why three prominent motherboard manufacturers - Foxconn, Gigabyte, and DFI - have chosen to drop the part from their lineups. The entire nForce 700 series has disappeared from the product listing on the websites of these three companies, though popular products from eVGA, XFX, MSI, and ASUS remain displayed.

It is tough to make sense of any of this. On one hand, NVIDIA themselves say they are not getting out of the chipset business and present very relevant facts to back up that point. On the other hand, three well-known motherboard manufacturers have removed an entire product line from their websites, and a look into the future suggests NVIDIA’s chipset biz might be through. We’ll get into that last bit in more detail tomorrow. Intel engineers gave us some insight into the X58 platform that you may want to be aware of.

Source: Digitimes

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