One year ago, NVIDIA’s chipset business was on the ropes, courtesy of a lawsuit from Intel and declining AMD processor sales. News last week of Intel burying the hatchet seems good and NVIDIA losing Apple as a chipset customer sounds bad. But the combination is, in effect, the knockout punch, so adios NVIDIA chipsets, as I wrote in October 2009.
NVIDIA’s demise in the chipset game is no big deal, Barron’s magazine opines:
“This is not news,” [Needham & Co. analyst Rajvindra Gill] tells me this afternoon by phone. “The fate of the chipset business has been telegraphed for some time now by management and by the Street.” Chipsets are a business NVIDIA is exiting, so it’s really all about the pace of the run-off of that business.
Chipsets are a commodity with thin margins. Apple is, and always has been, a fickle customer for chip suppliers – just ask Motorola and IBM. So a bloody nose for NVIDIA should hardly have come as a surprise.
NVIDIA’s latest forays, 
the Tegra processor for mobile computing and Tesla graphics processor module with CUDA supercomputing architecture, look interesting. Investors agree, shooting the company’s stock skyward after a 40% dip last summer. Time will tell how the next round of the graphics fight versus AMD will play out. After losing the last round, NVIDIA’s latest punch lands with zing. My take: I won’t invest, but I still like NVIDIA graphics chips.