"Amid yesterday's stock market carnage one tech stock significantly underperformed the rest on our list and once more it was NVIDIA.

Having lost a lot of ground the previous week, NVIDIA's share price plunged by a further 13 percent yesterday. Yes, AMD and pretty much all other stocks fared poorly, but NVIDIA's drop was still exceptional.

On top of all its other woes, the catalyst for this sell-off appears to have been a negative report from Pacific Crest analyst Michael McConnell, in which he said: "Our checks confirm that Nvidia has decided to exit the chipset market next year."

The quote was published on the Barron's website, as was NVIDIA's response: "The Pacific Crest report was wrong. We are continuing to invest in our chipset business and drive new and exciting platforms for all PCs. This is a long term and important strategy for us."

We spoke briefly to NVIDIA's UK PR manager Ben Berraondo and reminded us that NVIDIA is releasing MCP7A chipset on Oct 15th and confirmed that it has MCP (i.e. chipset) products due to come out next year.

What has yet to be clarified are NVIDIA's long-term plans for its chipset business after it has fulfilled all its current obligations. Dropping chipsets would leave it with just the discrete graphics business to focus on, which could be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it.

However, if this imminent launch and those scheduled for next year are successful it will surely be a difficult area of business for NVIDIA to walk away from."