14 DAY TRIAL // There are both good and bad news coming from the hardware manufacturing companies which are active on the graphics processing units market segment. The good news is that both companies that count, Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia, are preparing a whole new line of products as the holiday shopping season approaches. The bad news is that, if you are looking through the eyes of the two companies, things are going to get mighty ''interesting'' fast.
Sometime ago Nvidia organized a partner conference in Amsterdam and according to the news site fudzilla, the graphics processing units manufacturing company claimed to hold around 75 percent of the discrete graphics cards market while planning to further boost its foothold. Right now things may look pretty good from Nvidia's perspective, but it is very unlikely that it will be able to further increase its market dominance as already AMD's graphics division is marketing its mainstream and entry level products in a very aggressive way that directly translates into a market share comeback.
As Advanced Micro Devices is set to launch new products in a very short time and lower the price tags all around the board for its graphics processing units, it looks like Nvidia will not gain more market share, but rather lose some ground.
In order to maintain its position as a market leader Nvidia will soon launch its own new range of graphics processing units, the G98 which is also known as D8M and G92. The G98 GPU is set to replace the currently used G86 chip that is used on the GeForce 8400 GS cards and which is built using the 80 nanometer fabrication process. The new G98 graphics processing unit will be sold for $17 apiece to graphics cards manufacturers and cards based on this new chips will start coming out by the middle of November and they will push for the entry level market with their price tags that start at $50.
At the same time there are rumors concerning a big order for graphics processing units launched by Nvidia to the United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) foundry that is expected to start producing in mass quantity the new 65 nanometer based graphics chip, the G92 which is also known as D8P. As the G92 is used at powering GeForce 8800 GT graphics cards, users may expect that enough such cards will already be available on their official launch date, just before the end of the month.