Workstation Market Not on AMD's Immediate To Do List

After 99.9% of all CPUs for the workstation market were supplied by Intel in the third quarter of 2010, analysts have concluded that AMD is simply not overly interested in this market segment, being more bent on fighting against NVIDIA on the graphics cards front.

The CPU workstation market may be a reasonably important segment of the IT industry, but AMD seems to be putting much of its effort into other venues.

As far as anything professional goes, Advanced Micro Devices has so far focused on fighting against NVIDIA in terms of professional graphics cards.

This translates into an ongoing showdown between the AMD FirePro and the NVIDIA Quadro lines, and it seems that said competition has grabbed all of AMD's attention.

As market tracking firm Jon Peddie Research has it, this is because AMD's has to be careful who and how to engage and does not exactly see workstations as its immediate interest.

In other words, unlike Intel, AMD cannot afford to start battles on every market segment it could possibly address.

"AMD maintains a presence as a supplier to the workstation industry, plying its professional-brand FirePro GPUs, but as far as we can tell the company has thrown in the towel when it comes to selling its CPUs into the same space," said Alex Herrera, senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research.

"Workstations look to be the ugly step-child, with servers grabbing all the attention. The two platforms share a similar architecture and system components in dual-socket (2S) configurations, but where 2S platforms represent the bulk of server volume, they represent a relatively small share (around 20%) of workstations, making them less interesting to server management,” mr. Herrera said.

“Similarly, the prospect of building a single-socket mobile or entry desktop - where the majority of the volume is - isn’t likely attractive to the client side of the business, since the volumes pale in comparison to PCs," he added.

"Ironically, AMD itself sees the value of the workstation market. Otherwise, why would it continue to push FirePro graphics? Predominantly represented by OEMs, the TAM for FirePro is tied almost 1:1 with workstation volume. So if the volume for workstations is too low for AMD CPUs to bother, why is it enough for AMD GPUs to care," analyst notes.