RV770, Swift to Bring Back AMD's Lost Market Share

Advanced Micro Devices intends to get back the company's lost graphics market share with the advent of its highest-end graphics processor in the RV770 family. According to AMD, the company expects its shares to rise substantially immediately after the new graphics cards are released on the market.

The AMD roadmap specifies that the next generation of graphics processors will be announced during the second quarter of the year, and unofficial sources even claim that it has been slated for release sometime in May. The preliminary tests, combined with the technical specifications, claim that the RV770-based graphics cards in the Radeon HD 4800 family can deliver 40 percent more graphics power than any other graphics product from AMD.

The latest report issued by the Jon Peddie Research consulting company reads that the graphics division of Advanced Micro Devices (the former ATI) continues to bleed market share. On the other side of the fence, Nvidia has managed to gain additional market share during the fourth quarter of the last year. The company now accounts for 71% of the total shipped units, a 7 percent increase as compared to the previous quarter. AMD only managed to ship less than 30 percent on the graphics cards market.

However, Nvidia is not the only threat that AMD has to face in the graphics business, as Intel is also aiming at delivering new generations of chipsets with integrated graphics cores. AMD responded to Intel's integrated graphics cores for mobile processors with its own Swift micro-architecture, part of the Fusion platform, that integrates graphics and computing cores on the same silicon.

The Swift micro-architecture will come in two flavors, depending on the number of cores: the dual-core chip will be called the Black Swift, while the single-core counterpart will be named the White Swift. Both chips will be built on the K10 micro-architecture and are expected to hit the shelves during the second half of the next year.