14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices is seen as a rather unique company, as it works on two different areas of the market, central processing units and graphics processors. One of NVIDIA's VPs sees the Sunnyvale chip maker this way, and sustains his statement through the fact that AMD is not focused only on CPU, the way Intel would be, not exclusively on GPUs, as NVIDIA.
AMD goes for the two approaches, and it looks like loving both CPUs and GPUs. As many of you already know, AMD's graphics division ATI has managed to impress lately and brought the company good money while taking the graphics segment crown away from NVIDIA. On the other hand, its K10 chip is said to have failed impressing the market, yet the manufacturer is preparing the launch of its next-generation Phenom II processors, also known under the code-name Deneb.
The giant chip maker Intel is also preparing to enter the GPU market with its already announced Larrabee part, which is expected to surface at some point in late 2009 or in 2010. NVIDIA will remain at that time the company to have only GPUs in its pocket. The green goblin will have to prove the enormous necessity of GPUs, while AMD will be split between the CPU and GPU.
Seen from a different perspective, AMD has a bigger advantage this way, as it will continue not only to sell both chips, but also develop a platform that will embrace the two and a motherboard / chipset. Intel is a big player on the graphics market too, with 50 percent market share brought to it by the Integrated Graphics Processor (IGP). The Santa Clara based chip maker fails to impress on the smart graphics, gaming and even parallel computing segments.
Intel will change the current state of things with the launch of Larrabee, but, until that happens, AMD will still hold a privileged position on the market, as it will continue to look after its first born CPU and the adopted GPU follower, the Radeon graphics.