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PREDICTION: Within two years, Nvidia will be purchased by IBM, Intel, or some other huge tech company.
BASIS: The market for discrete GPUs will be declining, if not completely stagnant. Integrated GPUs are becoming far more capable (see AMD's upcoming Llano and Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge), and the long-term trend will be for fast, simple SIMD processors to be bundled onto the CPU die (like AMD's Fusion, Intel's Knights Ferry) which also reduces the market for "general purpose GPU" like Nvidia's Tesla and AMD's FireGL.
Nvidia no longer has a chipset business. They instead are trying to break into the embedded market with Tegra (as used in the Zune), but their design wins are becoming fewer. Most recently, the Tegra was booted out of the potentially-awesome Boxee Box (TV streamer, due out next month) because it's not fast enough. The low-power GPU market that Tegra competes in is pretty saturated now with some very good competition, like the GPUs in the iPhones, Android phones, etc. Tegra's just not too competitive anymore.
They're in fewer markets today than they were a year ago, and the ones they're in are shrinking.
But they have a massive patent portfolio (both of their own, and from their acquisitions like 3dfx). And they have talented engineers that could be put to use as part of designing next-gen CPU components. A very likely acquisition target for Intel or IBM.
BASIS: The market for discrete GPUs will be declining, if not completely stagnant. Integrated GPUs are becoming far more capable (see AMD's upcoming Llano and Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge), and the long-term trend will be for fast, simple SIMD processors to be bundled onto the CPU die (like AMD's Fusion, Intel's Knights Ferry) which also reduces the market for "general purpose GPU" like Nvidia's Tesla and AMD's FireGL.
Nvidia no longer has a chipset business. They instead are trying to break into the embedded market with Tegra (as used in the Zune), but their design wins are becoming fewer. Most recently, the Tegra was booted out of the potentially-awesome Boxee Box (TV streamer, due out next month) because it's not fast enough. The low-power GPU market that Tegra competes in is pretty saturated now with some very good competition, like the GPUs in the iPhones, Android phones, etc. Tegra's just not too competitive anymore.
They're in fewer markets today than they were a year ago, and the ones they're in are shrinking.
But they have a massive patent portfolio (both of their own, and from their acquisitions like 3dfx). And they have talented engineers that could be put to use as part of designing next-gen CPU components. A very likely acquisition target for Intel or IBM.
One of the profs I've done work for is a major guy in the music information retrieval field. 
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