GhostRyder
Posts: 2,151 +588
Well yes, but he has made the company back to being fully profitable coming from the crash due to ICC and bringing ATI back in full force on the market.It took AMD six months of well qualified applicants turning down the position of CEO before the board settled on Read. AMD could undoubtedly use someone with a better grasp of the technical aspects of the job (something he seems to very much lack), but the difficulty is that AMD isn't attractive to the better qualified execs.
Well that due to more applications supporting OpenCL including Adobe which is a very popular software suite. Apple picked up on the professional side by including firepro series instead of quaddro which since apple products are loved enough will bring them back to a reasonable level on the professional side of things.I actually posted on the D700 a little while ago. At the margins it is being sold at, it looks like AMD are basically giving the cards away considering the QA (runtime validation) that goes into professional grade GPUs and memory ICs. No doubt AMD will pick up market share in professional graphics, but that is predicated upon better OpenCL support, so I wouldn't be counting too many chickens just yet.
But that's just discrete, the mobile market is also having more a focus on the APU's which this does not include (Unless they are including that aspect in the chart). It was apparent their focus on the higher end mobile graphics is dwindling with the release of the M290X which was just a rebrand as you pointed out of the 8970m. But then again, no one seems to want to focus much on the mobile discrete GPU's.It's actually 35%, and has been gradually falling for the last few quarters, largely due to a decreasing presence in the mobile markets. The more worrying aspect is that this decrease has happened in spite of AMD's Gaming Evolved game bundles, Mantle, and release of a new architecture
Being slow has been an issue in the past, less apparent in this day and age. However I disagree with the comment on "Limited to a handful of graphics", while it maybe a bit more open than Mantle is at the moment, NVidia has a history and has already announced dropping older GPU lines like hot cakes in terms of support. While its not a huge amount, its going to depend on what cards they decide to keep or work with this support especially regarding Fermi.That's a lot of variables that AMD have to surmount. AMD burned more than a few bridges with OEMs over delays and obfuscation with features and drivers in the mobile and desktop segments (Enduro, VCE missing in action etc). With regards software, AMD have just added a considerable workload for their driver team - Mantle (including getting GCN 1.0 and 1.1 working with it), DX12, and finding some extra performance for Nvidia's inbound low CPU overhead driver -which won't be limited to a handful of graphics card models.
There always seems to be an air of unbridled optimism by those that follow AMD, and yet if they've proved one thing it's that any technical edge they possess is never exploited fully, nor is it marketed particularly well. In the past AMD also had console contracts, also had technological leads (AMD64, GPU lossless audio, tessellation), also had first-to-market on new processes and architectures. Shouldn't those have translated into a better graph than the one above? and believe me, the CPU, x86 server, and overall graphics market share graphs look a lot less flattering.
Well ive said it before ill say it again, when you have 2 companies not focused on delivering great experiences for their products and instead focus on ways to harm the opponents doing well, this is what happens. Whether or not you like it, the famous ICC and the PhysX implementation along with programming games specifically to make things like CFX difficult just brings the whole market down on them. They win a lawsuit, but of course people drag their feet intentionally because they are allowed to which just brings the market crumbling down on the company.