What else do Nvidia produce...their mobo chipset department is all but dead, I think they have some small share in the mobile chip market, and the PS3 GPU, not surprising they are having trouble, and I'm sorry to say but it can only get worse with the state of fermi.
Chipsets are dead, the ION 2 "chipset" has zero chipset functionality, its the only chipset they really make now and it requires a Atom and the Atom chipset from Intel and is connected via PCI-E and not through a proper interconnect. PS3 gpu is Nvidia, but every single person in the world is predicting Sony dumping Nvidia for their next console in the next couple years, Sony don't like Nvidia, Nvidia pee off all of their partners by abusing their position and generally being arrogant. Sony were set to go Intel if they had anything ready, I can see a move to AMD if Intel aren't ready, which is more and more likely.
As Nvidia's low end becomes less competitive and even less so again come the next gen they'd have to move their low end, up to Fermi derivities, which will be even worse for Nvidia because it will mean less profit per sale, in their most profitable sector, not good. I mean basically the "Fermi" low end will likely be double the size of the current low end they make. Double the size means lower yields + half the cores per wafer, meaning they'll cost more than double to make but need to be sold in the same price range.
Nvidia supply apple with the GPUs for their new MacBooks which will help a bit.
I'm sure NV will bounce back on the share front
Nope, Nvidia have basically dominated Apple for a while with zero sign of AMD, they should be providing every GPU Apple need, with almost every passing month Apple are increasing their usage of AMD and using less Nvidia chips. Nvidia are losing their grip on all the area's they used to completely dominate.
Nvidia are a pretty huge company, they won't disappear any time soon. Competition will suffer until they get their act together though, i expect rip off pricing from both parties for a while longer yet.
They really will, unfortunately, analysts are slowly losing patience, after the first quarter of Fermi sales they'll really have very little to tell investors, unless they lie, that Fermi made a huge loss and by then everyone will know for a fact if its in production or not, if its not lots of people will lose confidence in them, but even worse, it means all the OEM builders will all be using AMD in their high end machines, that means in most purple shirt stores most of the high end rigs will all have AMD in, thats how companies get popular, when the average joe can only see one name across all the high end expensive rigs, it makes them think they should have AMD aswell, even if their computer only has a 4350 in it.
NVidia have it good right now, they've almost exclusively been making profit off low end sales of their 40nm dx10.1 gpu. Its probably the only area that will be profitable with high sales for their DX11 gpu's(and theres no sign of them coming in the next 4-5 months, only the mid end has taped out and thats probably still 3 months away). But when Llano hits, on 32nm no less we'll have quad cores with powerful graphics that Nvidia low end won't be competitive with and AMD doing deals with all the people Nvidia normally sells low end gpu's too.
IN the next 18-24 months Intel and AMD will completely exclude Nvidia from the low end market, the only place Nvidia's been making profit in the past 12 months.
Nvidia have slowly lost most of their profit from the high end for the past year, and aren't getting it back, they've gone from unprofitable in the high end, to unable to produce a high end. Midrange has gone from high to low profits and will likely go from low to no profits on Fermi, the low end has always been the highest profit sector, and within 2 years they won't have a low end market.
Tegra is doing FAR worse than Nvidia claim, Tegra 2 is late, missed a bunch of deadlines for a bunch of companies and Samsung, one of the biggest "wins" for the Tegra 2 design, dumped it because its not good enough.
THeir chipset market is completely dead, gpu's are drying up, the majority of their market(low end) is simply not going to be there anymore in a year or two, their mobile stuff is highly marketed but not very successful at all, their business/gpgpu stuff can't sustain the R&D costs when most of their other profit has dried up.
They are basically boned for the long term, the only question is how long can they last after they stop making profit.
This is all ontop of the fact that when AMD switch to Global foundries for GPU, their size/power/clockspeed/yield advantage will bump them even further ahead. TSMC skimp out and make cheap designs, Global foundries 28nm is set to be about 20-30% smaller than TSMC's 28nm for the same transistor count, all process's are not equal. Likewise they won't have the leakage, power or yield problems TSMC will almost certainly have at 28nm. If AMD are already making cores that are some 50% smaller, if both do the usual doubling of shaders when moving to a lower process and doubling the transistor count you'd expect if they both stayed at TSMC, for the size difference to remain the same. If AMD go to Global and drop 20-30% of their size, it will end up a 60-65% smaller core instead, which will mean even more cores per wafer, on a process that has vastly higher yields and less leakage so is capable of going higher clock speeds.
You could be looking at a core that is 65% smaller, with significantly higher yields, costing maybe 30% of what an Nvidia core would cost to produce while the bump in clock speeds and the lack of improvements at TSMC could see AMD flat out faster than Nvidia aswell as cheaper, Nvidia would be simply done at that point. Imagine if the 5870 was on Global foundries now, cost 25% less due to size/yields and could clock 20% faster. You'd have 5870's at £220, and beating a 480gtx at stock and making a profit, Nvidia can't make a profit now on a 480gtx at £450.