NVIDIA Might Lose GPU Market Share to AMD

Recent happening in the IT industry may conclude with a less than favorable marketing performance on NVIDIA's part, while AMD may actually grow in share by the end of June.

Ever since AMD bought ATI, it and NVIDIA have been in a sort of duel over dominance on the graphics card market.

Granted, NVIDIA has been staying in the lead for quite a while, and while it is unclear whether this position is threatened at the moment, the possibility exists that its market share will decline by the end of this year's first half.

AMD's launch of the Radeon HD 6990 won't have that great a bearing on overall sales, since it is a high-end board that just a handful of enthusiasts will go for, not to mention that NVIDIA will soon match it with its own dual-GTX model.

What really is expected to make a difference in their market shares is the recent decision on Apple's part to use AMD GPUs instead of NVIDIA ones for its MacBook pro notebooks.

The so-called sources cited by Digitimes, who is behind the report, supposedly said that AMD won Apple over through corporative attitude and a good quote (prices).

NVIDIA, on the other hand, is not as quick to drop the prices of its products, so it may just be that Apple will call upon AMD in the future as well.

So far, Apple only shipped a fairly small volume of MacBook Pro laptops, so AMD won't get much wealth yet.

Still, if AMD manages to land orders for more systems, maybe from other product lines as well, its sales will only go up, even as NVIDIA's slide down.

On the other hand, even losing some of tis 60% share of the GPU segment might not be so dreadful for the latter, considering that the success of its Tegra 2 ARM SoC on the smartphone and tablet market will probably return solid revenues and make up the difference.