ATI Takes the Lead
After a long stretch of dominance, NVIDIA has fallen behind ATI in discrete GPU shipments. According to Mercury Research, ATI claims 51% of the market, and NVIDIA has slipped to, you guessed it, 49%. NVIDIA was the leader this time last year with 59% market share, illustrating about-face in overall shipments.
ATI also took the 2nd place position from NVIDIA in the integrated GPU market (IGP), pulling in 24.5% compared to NVIDIA's 19.8%. Intel has traditionally led the pack, and clocked in last quarter at a healthy 54% of IGP shipments.
These are no doubt tough times for NVIDIA. Apple's latest desktops (Mac and iMac) made the switch to ATI GPUs, and they've recently lost a court case involving patent infringments to Rambus, who claims that NVIDIA's GeForce, Quadro, nForce ,Tesla and Tegra chips' memory controllers were used without proper licensing. A judge ruled that NVIDIA is required to pay licensing fees to Rambus going forward.
[via
CNET]
NVIDIA Announces Fermi-Based Quadro Cards at SIGGRAPH
At the SIGGRAPH conferance in Los Angeles, NVIDIA announced their new line of Quadro cards based on their beefy, Fermi chipset. These cards are purchased for professional applications such as medical imaging, physics simulations, and other insanely computational heavy studies. Quadro cards are generally used for their ability to out-scale CPU solutions, with the current stable seeng a 5x increase in performance, and 8x increase in simulation capabilities.
The fermi flavored Quadro cards come in three SKUs; 4000, 5000, 6000, and the Plex 7000. The Plex is actually an array of cards, rather than a single unit like the others, meant for extreme applications. For examples of what the Quadro cards can do, take a peak at the videos blow, produced by NVIDIA. Here's the spec breakdown:
Quadro 4000: 2GB GDDR5, 256 CUDA cores, $1,199. Available now.
Quadro 5000: 2.5GB GDDR5, 352 CUDA cores, $2,249. Available now.
Quadro 6000: 6GB GDDR5, 448 CUDA cores, $4,999. Available in the Fall.
Quadro Plex 7000: 2 GPUs, 12GB GDDR5, 896 CUDA cores, $14,5000. Available in the Fall
[
NVIDIA: QUADRO PRESS RELEASE]
