October 7 - 1:45pm EDT   According to an analyst with the Pacific Crest Securities, chipset manufacturer NVIDIA will stop making media and communications chipsets in 2009, representing 21 percent of the company‘s current revenue. While the Tuesday report notes that NVIDIA had flat-out denied similar rumors back in August, its partners AMD and Intel are both are breaking into the mainboard chipset business themselves, Intel with in-house efforts and AMD with the recent purchase of chipmaker ATI. [full story]

August 8 - 9:25am EDT   NVIDIA today licensed a collection of technologies from Transmeta for $25 million that will potentially improve the power use of the former's graphics and mainboard hardware. The license primarily grants NVIDIA access to LongRun2, a technique to reduce the amount of waste power for processors and similar chips. The approach uses a combination of circuitry and advanced math to reduce the effect of leaking power as processors are made on smaller and smaller manufacturing processes. This lets companies shrink components to make them more complex without having to throttle back clock speed or other elements to avoid creating too much waste power and heat. [full story]

August 1 - 12:15pm EDT   (Updated with analyst commentary) NVIDIA may quit the mainboard chipset industry entirely just as it's rumored to be expanding into new areas, if a claim from companies producing the final mainboards themselves. The California-based creator of the nForce line has allegedly held a meeting this week to determine whether it should continue producing chipsets at all but has been met with "silence," hinting both that NVIDIA was already considering an exit but also that weak demand gives it little reason to continue. [full story]

July 30 - 8:40pm EDT   Apple's rumored non-Intel mainboard platform may primarily involve a change of suppliers to NVIDIA rather than any kind of custom development, PCPer suggests. The enthusiast site notes that Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA has been developing its first nForce mainboard chipset for Intel-based notebooks, currently codenamed MCP79, with the aim of improving several weaknesses that have affected Intel's own designs and thus Apple as well. The architecture would support all the necessary components for Intel's just-announced Core 2 processors, including a 1,066MHz system bus and the option of DDR3 memory. [full story]

May 6 - 10:40am EDT   NVIDIA is shifting its emphasis from speed to energy today with the official launch of Hybrid SLI, its unique power-saving graphics technology. Rather than run two chips at once for greater performance, as with normal SLI, the new approach dynamically switches between video hardware depending on the need. In casual use, the technology can run on basic integrated video to save power and reduce heat; games and other demanding tasks will automatically invoke a dedicated graphics card if present. [full story]

March 18 - 2:45pm EDT   Alienware this afternoon upgraded its Area-51 gaming tower to take advantage of NVIDIA's latest speed boosts. The new system uses NVIDIA's just-introduced nForce 790i Ultra SLI mainboard and now has the option of the GeForce 9800 GX2 for video. The combination not only provides the fastest gaming performance from a single card, according to Alienware, but also adds more breathing room for expanded performance: the new nForce platform freely allows more CPU overclocking in its BIOS than earlier Area-51 models and also provides extra bandwidth for peripherals through PCI Express 2.0 as well as DDR3 memory. [full story]