What Future for NVidia?

With its GeForce 9400M, NVidia released a key product in 2008. As often stated, this is GeForce GPU to which chipset functions have been added, and not like with current Intel solution, a chipset to which one grafts a GPU.

The success of this solution is has been huge and is still popular for high-end notebooks, Apple was the first manufacturer to adopt it for its entire notebook models. However, it might well be the last coup from NVidia for notebooks. Indeed, Intel decided that its future mobile platform, entitled Arrendale, will be dramatically different. The graphical unit will not be associated to the chipset anymore but directly integrated in the CPU, on the same die than the processor.

This design should bring an important improvement to performance levels, simply based on the higher frequency and its closer interaction with the CPU. In this case, the GPU controller would not help and could degrade performance, so it would not be benefic to add a second discrete powerful GPU as it is currently the case in the MacBook Pro.
In such context, NVidia will have only one solution to maintain its position once Intel released Arrendale: associate a higher performance chipset to their high-end GPU in order to maintain a good performance level. But two problems will need to be solved to achieve such goal:
- Obtain license from Intel for the forthcoming architecture, nothing easy as both companies becoming openly competitors have more and more problem for cross-licensing, on the other end it can be criticized for monopoly…
- Release the most powerful GPU able to provide stunning 3D effects, GPGPU performance while controlling power consumption as low as possible, in a dynamic manner, to adapt to the usage of mobile architecture.
Another solution might be found, but NVidia does not have many cards in its hand to compete with the forthcoming Intel Arrendale. AMD and ATI can always deliver an Intel-like solution, but NVidia is alone... At the end, the GF 9400 M chipset might have been the best and last product from NVidia. If you remember just before its introduction some rumors were already indicating that NVidia will stop chipset development (http://www.hardmac.com/news/2008-10-08/#8975)... so at the end it could well be true and have some rational.