Although in a disadvantaged situation, Nvidia would be able to maintain supremacy on the graphics card market

Jun 25, 2008 08:54 GMT  ·  By

Scott Herkelman, the president of BFG Technologies, an Nvidia-exclusive supplier of graphics cards, stated in an interview that Intel's highly anticipated graphics processing unit, also known as Larrabee, would change the market of graphics processors. He also said that, even so, Nvidia would be able to remain on top.

In an interview with Hexus website he said that "Next year we're going to see a completely different competitive landscape and it will change how people buy graphics cards."

[admark=1]The whole graphics card market will be changed without any doubt by the emergence of two players, that is Advanced Micro Devices and Intel, who are able to supply complete platforms consisting of a central processing unit, a core-logic and a graphics processing unit. The change will mostly be due to the fact that system integrators and consumers would rather buy their products from a single supplier.

Nvidia will get through a crucial stage in the new light of events, as it does not manufacture x86 central processing units and it seems to have quite a few problems with its inability to get a license on Intel QuickPath Interconnect bus. Under these circumstances the company needs to strongly sustain its graphics card market share in order to remain a competitor in the IT industry.

"A lot of companies have gone out of business trying to compete with NVIDIA on GPUs," added Mr. Herkelman.

The president of BFG also discussed the recent price cut Nvidia implemented in what regards its GeForce 9800 GTX cards, getting them from $349 to $199 quite suddenly, and said that the Nvidia add-in-board partner may find itself in trouble here. As many graphics card suppliers, distributors and retailers have a lot of products in stock, such a price drop may either cause money losses or require compensation from Nvidia, which already registers financial issues. He also added that the Santa Clara company would probably display a different attitude towards various corporations, depending on the different relationships the GPU developer has established with them.

"Each partner is in a unique position - it's not clear cut how to react to price adjustments," Mr. Herkelman said.