The company's most likely move in the netbook arena would be to provide integrated chipsets with better graphics than most netbooks offer now. The graphics giant already provides integrated chipsets for laptops and next year will ship the Tegra system-on-chip for smartphones. Tegra puts an Arm processor core, a GeForce graphics core and other components, including a high-definition video decoder, onto a single chip.

Integrated chipsets is just one focus of the company as it tries to grow in these tough economic times. Nvidia also is trying to push further into the supercomputing space through its Tesla platform, which includes graphics processing units (GPUs) with 240 cores as well as the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) programming architecture, a set of development tools that allows programs to be executed on its graphics processors.

The company is now developing Tesla-based "personal supercomputers" in partnership with PC makers including Dell and Lenovo. It already offers such systems with Penguin Computing and Velocity Micro. Nvidia claims the systems can process data as much as 250 times faster than standard PCs, with 960 processing cores in four GPUs.