Ion, Nvidia's only ray of hope?
Meanwhile, Nvidia is still selling its Ion chipset.
"Customers including Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Acer, ASUS and others are continuing to incorporate GeForce 9400M and ION products in their current designs. There are many customers that have plans to use ION or GeForce 9400M chipsets for upcoming designs, as well," said Burke.
Burke also noted that Nvidia continued to sell a higher quantity of chipsets on AMD platforms than AMD itself. "MCP61-based platforms continue to be extremely well positioned in the entry CPU segments where AMD CPUs are most competitive vs. Intel," he continued, maintaining Nvidia would "continue to innovate integrated solutions for Intel's FSB architecture."
"We firmly believe that this market has a long healthy life ahead," Burke told us, concluding with curious optimism. "We expect our MCP business for both Intel and AMD to be strong well into the future."
It wasn't clear where Burke expects all this future Intel chipset business to come, especially if Nvidia loses the court case and is denied the opportunity to make chipsets for the latest Intel CPUs. We can only assume that Nvidia expects Intel to need graphics help for its other platforms for the forseeable future, and that Nvidia will be in a position to provide it.