14 DAY TRIAL // It is a well known fact that NVIDIA is currently leading the workstation segment of the graphics cards market. NVIDIA's Quadro products are the leaders in that market, and the green company sees more than 60 percent margin. Other big industry players, including Intel and AMD, are planning to gain some market share in that area as well, since the earnings are so high. For comparison, the margins in the gaming high end cards area are placed around 15 percent.
Since the workstation market is so lucrative, and NVIDIA accounts for an 85 percent share, Intel already announced plans to release its upcoming Larrabee product for that segment in mid-2009. Moreover, AMD seems to be coming down the road as well, which is not an advantage for NVIDIA for sure. A simple solution for ATI, AMD's graphics cards division, would be inking some deals with big workstation OEMs like Dell and HP, which would ensure a piece of the market.
It seems that ATI is already working on an improved version of an OpenGL driver, and some even say that there will be design wins in early 2009. If in this segment ATI proves to be as good as in the high-end market, then NVIDIA does have something to worry about. ATI’s FireGL line should be cheaper and faster than NVIDIA's solutions, and an improved OpenGL means a lot in terms of great performance in the market.
Since ATI did so well this year, the division was skipped when it came to the latest job cuts AMD announced a few days ago. The future 40nm cards are also expected to do great and the company should be able to get the crown from NVIDIA once again. AMD is still laying off some of its staff, especially since 2009 was announced as a year of recession, and IT players will also be affected by the economic crisis.