Nvidia vs. The World

I don't know how many of you follow computer hardware news, but recently there have been quite a few shake ups and changes in the computer hardware marketplace. A few years ago, video card manufacturer Nvidia decided to start making its own motherboard chipsets. This put them on the outs with the CPU manufacturer Intel, but made them a natural choice for an alliance with AMD.

However, earlier this year, AMD purchased ATI. ATI has long been the 2nd place player in the video card market. So now that AMD has ATI to support, it has dropped the Nvidia partnership. Add to this that Intel has announced plans to ramp up its own video card division and return video processing back to the CPU "Where it belongs". Where does all of this leave Nvidia?

So far, Nvidia has been coping fairly well. By turning to the motherboard manufacturers themselves, they have still retained support in the marketplace. However the days of get an AMD AND Nvidia SLI compatible motherboard seem over. This cuts the effective market for Nvidia video cards effectively in half.

Both Nvidia and ATI have "Top Secret" products in development planned for release at the end of the year. It will be interesting to see how this story evolves over time and what affect it will have on pricing and availability of products in the marketplace.