Nvidia Corp. on Wednesday officially confirmed what was obvious long ago: it would stop development of its chipsets, which were quite popular several years ago. Due to unclear future of Nvidia’s positions on Advanced Micro Devices’ and Intel Corp.’s platforms, the company does not want to continue spending on designing such chips. In addition, the company accused Intel of unfair behavior.

“We have said that we will continue to innovate integrated solutions for Intel's FSB architecture. 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,” said Robert Sherbin, a spokesperson for Nvidia, reports PC Magazine.

Starting next year Nvidia will not be able to sell chipsets for AMD Opteron microprocessors, Intel Core i3/i5/i7 series processors with or without integrated graphics, next-generation Intel Atom chips code-named Pineview and so on. As a result, it is not surprising that Nvidia is halting its investments into research and development of chipsets.

Core-logic business is still very important for Nvidia. In the second quarter of its fiscal 2010, chipset business accounted for 31% of Nvidia’s revenue, up 27% quarter-over-quarter. The lion’s share of Nvidia’s chipsets featuring built-in GeForce graphics core, hence, the company risks losing market share as soon as Intel and AMD release microprocessors with integrated graphics cores.

Tags: Nvidia, Geforce, Nforce, Ion, Intel, AMD, Atom, Pineview, Clarkfield