Rather sad news today brought by PC Perspective,
first announced here, and
with additional information here
To sum it up in a single line, while nVidia will continue to make chipsets for as long as there is a reasonable demand, they will stop developing new chipsets. There seems to be a new ION chipset in the pipeline, which is used with the Intel Atom CPU's, but any long term plans for the ION are unclear.
So will the nVidia chipsets be no more in a few years? And what will this mean? A few years ago there were several brands of chipsets out there, you had the Intel and AMD chipsets of course, but chipsets were also made by nVidia, VIA, SiS, ATI, and ALi.
ATI has been taken over by AMD a few years ago.
SiS is still making chipsets for both Intel and AMD CPU's, but they seem to be becoming increasingly rarer, I would not be surprised if they will not be around at all in another 5 years.
The last VIA chipsets were for the P4/K8, it would seem VIA has since shifted their attention to their C7/Nano series.
ALi also stopped making chipsets and have shifted their attention to other area's.
This situation sounds awfully similar to the X86 CPU market (Cyrix and IBM anyone?) and the GPU market (Remember Matrox and Hercules?), both of those markets are now dominated by one or two companies, other brand have either ceased to exist or have been reduced to a niche market.
So what does this mean for the free & open market? Is this yet another brick in the road to a closed and monopolized market or am I seeing things?