ATI take's Nvidia's rank in discrete GPU Sales; Apple jumps in bed with AMD

Overheal

No doubt after Apple, Dell, HP and other companies were severely burned by the Nvidia GPU Cluster**** (which is still ongoing for many) It looks like things are starting to take that downward turn fro the graphics giant.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20012025-64.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

CNET wrote:

Advanced Micro Devices passed Nvidia in graphics chip shipments in the second quarter, according to a report from a marketing research firm on Wednesday, adding to Nvidia's woes.
AMD's ATI graphics unit took 51 percent of the standalone, or "discrete," graphics chip market compared to Nvidia's share that was just shy of 49 percent, according to Mercury Research, a Cave Creek, Arizona firm that tracks graphics chip shipments. This is a sharp reversal from the same period a year ago when Nvidia had about 59 percent of the market and AMD had just under 41 percent.
Total market figures for the second quarter of 2010 had Intel with a 54.3 percent share, AMD with 24.5 percent, and Nvidia with 19.8 percent. This, also, is a setback for Nvidia: in the second quarter of last year, Nvidia had a 29.6 percent share compared to AMD's 18.2 percent.
Nvidia warned Wednesday that revenue would fall short of earlier projections. The warning came a day after Apple moved its iMac and Mac Pro lines to AMD graphics chips, dropping Nvidia.

Now if and when Intel is further cracked down on for shady Anti-Trust practices (that they even had a pet-name for), it will start to look like AMD will get the market share free mark capitalism really should deserve them.

Rsaeire

I read about ATI's market share gain on another site and it's not surprising at all given their recent success with their 5xxx series cards. Nvidia, while only recently finding its footing with its Fermi cards, don't appear to be that bad off. The GTX 460 will help Nvidia make up for lost time, especially since ATI's 6xxx series cards won't be anything special when they're launched at the end of this year/start of next year, but they're going to have to release a few more iterations to help keep any momentum the GTX 460 may have given them. Nevertheless, ATI will no doubt still retain the #1 spot for some time given that it has priced its cards well in comparison to competitors. Nvidia may offer features such as 3D Vision, CUDA etc, but for the majority of consumers, the mid-range is where it's at and ATI have it pretty much sewn up at the moment.

Apple moving to ATI was inevitable, as there's only so much flack a company can take with faulty GPUs before it says "enough" and finds another GPU source. It's also a good thing for mobile users with temperature concerns since Nvidia's Fermi cards as notorious for running too hot.

x in the city

serious, nvidia engineers got a hell of a lot to answer for, If i was running them I would have all them fired. frankly its pretty ridiculous.

Solitaire

But it wasn't really their fault. Stuff like this happens when designing GPUs, which is why you maintain semiconductor and materials science blokeys in your design labs to help unscramble the dodgy designs before they reach the fabs... oh wait, didn't nVidia get shot of theirs a few years back? Whoops. And then hire the wrong engineers to solve the resulting issues because no-one flagged the underlying design issues with the faulty GPUs? D'oh!

x in the city

about 4 years ago i was looking for jobs with nvidia, some serious engineering roles with serious job requirements.

looks like their 'hiring' plan wasn't up to much eh