Hardware nVidia closing chipset division?

[Carpetsmoker]

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?

[BSDfan666]

I feel very little sympathy for nVidia, anything that harms their business is worth cheering about.

Perhaps I'm being negative, but I dislike that no technical documentation is available for their graphics chipsets.. which should be a requirement for being a part of the open market.

[TerryP]

Actually, I find CarpetSmokers post much more ominous then his linkage!

This doesn't worry me in the least, all it means is the near future looks interesting and one should consider any nvidia/amd stock purchases carefully. Of course though, I am partial to nVidia cards for gaming - I've found them superior to ATI products that I've been exposed to. I'm not worried, and nVidia is a company I like lol.

Graphics cards support on *BSD, I only know two things: standards and documentation would make things nicer in the long run for everyone. Nether of which I expect to have any earth shattering changes within my life time.

[vermaden]

Long time ago nVidia created many good chipsets, nFroce2 family, nForce4 family, but starting from nForce5 quality/features/technical advancement stalled, they worked, but not as great as in the old days.

In the mean time Intel created very nice family of chipsets with 965P/965G/945P/945G along with newer versions, Q35/Q45/G35/G45/G33/G31/G43/G41/... same AMD here, 780G was quite a small revolution, such great integrated graphics with 40 shaders and such low power consumption, sam for its successors, like 790gx and 785g.

That was also nVidia problem, they chipsets was very more power hungry and because of that they also created more heat.

From their last chipsets chipset with integrated GeForce 9400M was nice, ION also brings something interesting.

Looking at their current REBRANDING policy where 8800GS becomes 9600GSO, which becomes GT130 is sick, same for many other graphics cards from them.

IMHO its VERY GOOD that they stop creating them, maybe some very custom sollutions (like ION) would be nice, but looking on their recent Core 2 chipsets, noching changed in newer versions (like with rebranding on gfx cards).

Also I really did not liked what problems they created for support of SLI, AMD gave away all specification manufanturers needed, so Intel creating chipsets, add CrossFire support without anyproblems. For nVidia's SLI, you had to but special N200 ships to add support of SLI, and you had buy TWO of those, to have QUAD SLI support ... instead of just implementing that info main chipset core logic.