No one cares about AMD or its graphics subsidiary ATI anymore. Well, apart from we Brits, that is. Then again, nobody loves rooting for a hapless chump quite like the British, either.
At least, that's what Nvidia spinmeister extraordinaire Roy Taylor reckons. Taylor is actually Nvidia's main man for Content Relations Stateside. But he has been kind enough to hop the pond to provide some insight into Nvidia's plans and prospects.
Insight such as this: "The UK is the only place in the world where anyone talks about AMD or ATI". To prove his point, Taylor went as far as showing us a graph representing the entire market for GPUs last year, both discreet and integrated. Astonishingly, ATI did not feature at all.
Where was ATI among the 366 million graphics chips which had apparently been split exclusively between Nvidia and Intel in 2007? "No one cares," Taylor says.
ATI who?
Well, to be more accurate, Nvidia didn't care enough to include ATI in that slide - Taylor did have another showing ATI with 18 per cent of the market, a figure apparently so small as to render it effectively non existent.
Indeed, Nvidia may care just a little more than it lets on, since Taylor was keen to press home the point by quoting two independent surveys (Valve's Steam users and the YouGamers community) which put ATI's market share for DirectX 10 compliant GPUs in the 12-13 per cent range. Ouch.
With what is shaping up to be a killer new GPU due out this summer and ATI still struggling to land an significant punches, there's a real swagger to Nvidia's gait of late. And yet its merciless dismissal of the old enemy ATI is only half of the story.
For Nvidia is now stalking a much bigger beast. The real threat over the next five years will almost definitely come from Intel. Especially now that Intel itself has staked a claim to Nvidia's graphics turf with the upcoming Larrabee chip.
And wouldn't you know it, Nvidia - viaTaylor - has that angle covered too. But that's a whole different ball game. In fact, it's one you can read about later on TechRadar.
