2. Toshiba Worldwide

There are about 166 different notebook vendors, but Toshiba has established its name in this sector like no other company.

Toshiba's corporations deliver a range of products covering industrial appliances, transportation, power plants, consumer products, medical systems, information and communications hardware.

When it comes to notebooks, this chart says it all when it comes to Toshiba's dominance of the mobile market: if you want to penetrate the notebook market, you couldn't do better than having Toshiba as a launch partner. Toshiba's experience in the mobile market, in combination with the reach of its service and sales centers around the world, gives NVIDIA an experienced, and valued partner. For NVIDIA, having a strong partner is very important because, the graphics card business is quite different from the notebook business. With graphics cards, you can simply give your VGA manufacturer the Gerber layout file, tell him where to download the driver, and off you go to mass production heaven. For instance: all desktop cards with NVIDIA chips use NVIDIA's driver, and most of them recycle NVIDIA's reference design, so that the only value-added features left to worry about are fancy coolers and PCB's in novelty colors.

However, this type of approach is not appropriate for the notebook industry. Every notebook design is unique, and requires extensive electronic, thermal and mechanical engineering, as well as dedicated driver support. With this in mind, the good old boys of the mobile VGA business had some mixed feelings about NVIDIA getting involved in this complicated but lucrative game. NVIDIA's upcoming chipset, along with the pace of development set by NVIDIA itself, raises the question whether NVIDIA will be able to provide enough support that is good enough for its notebook partners.