Ion could be Nvidia's fastest-growing business as the low-end PC market quickly grows, Huang said.

About 10 million netbooks shipped in 2008, and that number is expected to rise to 22 million in 2009, according to IDC. The netbook category is the only bright spot in an otherwise slumping PC industry, which has seen shipments of mainstream laptops and desktops fall, IDC has said.

The mobile space may be alluring in the short term, but Huang doesn't want Nvidia to lose its focus as a graphics-centric company.

"The [graphics processing unit] is ever more central to our computing experience. There is a rapidly growing number of applications that rely on the GPU, and the industry is gearing up to launch the next-generation operating systems that adopt GPU computing," Huang said in a statement.

Nvidia is designing GPUs to boost PC performance in upcoming operating systems, including Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Microsoft's Windows 7. The operating systems will include features to unload specific multimedia tasks, such as video editing, to graphics chips, while keeping CPUs free to execute generic computing tasks such as word processing.