Let me firstly state that there's nothing more unsubstantiated than this rumor from Digitimes. Yet 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. Some of these partners have already made their intentions clear by canceling mainboards that would use the nForce 7-series chipset, the report argues. The line is NVIDIA's flagship and gives both AMD- and Intel-based computers support for advanced performance features such as quad SLI, which teams up four video cards to accelerate 3D on one display.

SLI's future would be uncertain without a company dedicated to supporting it and would potentially hand a victory to AMD, which already ensures CrossFire support not just on mainboards that support its Athlon and Phenom processors but also certain Intel-based reference designs.

Updated - A response from NVIDIA's Bryan del Rizzo:

1. The story on Digitimes is completely groundless. We have no intention of getting out of the chipset business.
2. In fact, our MCP business is as strong as it ever has been for both AMD and Intel platforms:
   1. Mercury Research has reported that the NVIDIA market share of AMD platforms in Q2 08 was 60%. We have been steady in this range for over two years.
   2. SLI is still the preferred multi-GPU platform thanks to its stellar scaling, game compatibility and driver stability.
   3. nForce 790i SLI is the recommended choice by editors worldwide due to its compelling combination of memory performance, overclocking, and support for SLI. . . .
3. We're looking forward to bring new and very exciting MCP products to the market for both AMD and Intel platforms.

NVIDIA to back out of mainboard chipsets?