With this, AMD's profitability will go up thanks to Sky GPUs

Dec 23, 2013 09:40 GMT  ·  By

As some people will love to hear (and others will hate to admit for that matter), a supply deal from Apple can make the day of any hardware maker, and Advanced Micro Devices is no exception.

Sure, AMD does not depend on Apple, or any one company really, but it can only profit from supply deals with it, since they're invariably larger, in scope, than for most other corporations/system builders.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company has entered an agreement with Cupertino-based Apple Incorporated.

The terms are pretty simple: AMD will provide Apple with FirePro professional graphics cards for new Mac Pro products.

Each Mac Pro has two high-end FirePro cards (workstation-level, as news and rumors website Digitimes calls them).

The Apple deal alone is thought to increase AMD's expected share in the professional graphics market by 10%.

Previously, it was believed that the Sunnyvale chipmaker would only accumulate 20% of the segment during 2014.

And this was after taking into account the server-related products, both AMD's FirePro S10000 and Sky series GPUs, and the expected impact of OpenCL support (an open GPU computing platform, as opposed to NVIDIA's closed CUDA platform).

With Apple's orders, the share will be of around 30%. Who knows, maybe even higher, if AMD happens to get further contracts from other server and workstation builders.

Now we just have to wait and see if Advanced Micro Devices scores any big deals on the supercomputing front. FireStream GPU accelerators are pretty young, and they've been playing a distant second fiddle to NVIDIA's Tesla so far, but some FirePro cards might be used there too, so progress could come in this area as well.

In the meantime, new consumer-oriented FX CPUs will be made (though the brand might not last for too many years at this point) and many APUs (A-Series, Athlon and Sempron).