As of this week, it’s no longer business as usual for NVIDIA as the company has halted the production and development of its nForce line of chipsets until its legal issues with Intel are sorted out. Although the two companies have played well so far in Mac hardware, Intel brought a lawsuit against NVIDIA earlier this year to prevent it from making Intel-compatible chips. Not a very nice move from Intel, but NVIDIA has been making a pretty penny at Intel’s expense. We’re hoping this gets sorted soon because Apple’s use of Intel processors isn’t going to end any time soon, and it’s clear that the Mac line has done well with NVIDIA GPUs. Robert Sherbin of NVIDIA has this to say:
We firmly believe that this market has a long healthy life ahead. But because of Intel’s improper claims to customers and the market that we aren’t licensed to the new DMI bus and its unfair business tactics, it is effectively impossible for us to market chipsets for future CPUs. So, until we resolve this matter in court next year, we’ll postpone further chipset investments.
In the meantime, what’s a chipmaker who won’t be making chips supposed to do?
