14 DAY TRIAL // After starting 2009 holding the second place in the market segment for mobile graphics, AMD now boasts of having overtaken NVIDIA as prime supplier of mobile graphics chips. Product manager of AMD's mobile graphics business claims that it now holds 57% of the market share after scoring the most design wins not only for AMD but also for Intel platforms.
"We started this year as being the number two in the mobile graphics market but in the last nine months we gained 16 percent market share and now we're sitting at 57 percent," said Asif Rehman, product manager of AMD's mobile graphics business."We have won the mindshare of business both for Intel and AMD platforms."
What Asif Rehman means by that last statement is that not only has it taken the primary position in the market segment in question, but that Advanced Micro Devices is also working with 90% of the OEMs (Original equipment manufacturers) to promote its next-generation Radeon products, which will be introduced in the first quarter of 2010.
It is quite likely that the current quarter of 2009 marked AMD's overtaking of NVIDIA as primary supplier of mobile graphics chipsets. This is owed to the fact that the latter did not yield any innovative products whereas AMD did, in fact, launch next-generation graphics processing units which are capable of DirectX 11 graphics. Acer has already announced its plans to release a notebook with DirectX 11 graphics capabilities.
NVIDIA has recently stated that the headway AMD is making in the graphics processing unit market, thanks to the aforementioned DirectX 11 GPUs, will not have a lasting effect and that the market itself will not be affected in the long run. The situation, NVIDIA says, will be turned in its favor by the launch of Fermi-based graphics products. NVIDIA's ION 2 platform was also reported to have significantly superior performance capabilities, compared to Intel's mobile platforms, which means that the GPU manufacturer's position on the mobile market might not be as threatened as AMD implies.
Still, Rehman says that AMD's current leading position is genuine, according to Mercury Research numbers.