Nvidia is very late with its graphics chip, code-named Fermi. Meanwhile, Advanced Micro Devices launched its latest graphics chip in September. Today, AMD launched a new graphics card with a version of that new chip for under $100.
That means that the pendulum is swinging back toward AMD, which stands to gain market share in the ever-fluid graphics chip war. The newest ATI Radeon HD 5670 has support for the Microsoft DirectX 11 included in Windows 7 and it features the ATI Eyefinity technology, which can power three displays from one graphics card. Nvidia talked about Fermi in October, and it showed a working version at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. But it has made no announcement about when it will ship its first chip.
Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD has now beaten Nvidia for two product generations. It will be interesting to see how the market share figures change. Of course, AMD still has to worry about graphics that integrated into chip sets. Intel dominates that business. But these low-end Radeon chips mean that ATI’s strategy is working. Rather than design huge chips with a lot of non-graphics processing power, as Nvidia is doing, ATI is opting for streamlined designs. It’s easier to take these streamlined chips and make multiple product lines out of them, allowing AMD to quickly proliferate a new design from the high-end to the low-end of its product family.
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