HEXUS.sharewatch: NVIDIA continues to benefit from Intel’s misfortunes

Being an NVIDIA shareholder must be fun these days; the company doesn't even need to do anything for its share price to shoot up.

For the past three weeks, HEXUS.sharewatch has focused on the big jumps in the share prices of AMD and NVIDIA. In both cases, the primary driver has been setbacks suffered by their giant semiconductor rival Intel

To date, the big winner of the two has been AMD, which resolved its long-standing issues with Intel and received a nice bit of cash for its trouble. Last week, however, it was revealed that the US Federal Trade Commission was suing Intel in spite of this settlement, and that it was going to turn its attention to Intel's business practices in the graphics market too.

While AMD produces GPUs as well as CPUs, the big beneficiary from this news has been NVIDIA. This will partly be due to the fact that, unlike AMD, NVIDIA has yet to receive much regulatory assistance with its grievances. But NVIDIA also has some specific complaints against Intel regarding its licence to make chipsets for Intel CPUs and concerning perceived impediments to it competing fairly in the Atom chipset market.

The possibility of these issues being resolved in NVIDIA's favour as a result of the FTC's involvement contributed to a big jump in NVIDIA's share price on the day of the announcement. Furthermore, initial reports that Intel's next generation of Atom processors - featuring graphics integrated into the CPU - don't offer a great graphics improvement won't do NVIDIA any harm either.