Currently AMD holds 18% market share with their FirePro line of professional GPUs. This compares to NVIDIA who owns 81% with Quadro. I assume the "other" category is the sum of S3 and Matrox who, together, command 1% of the professional market (just the professional market)
According to Jon Peddie of JPR, as reported by X-Bit Labs, AMD intends to wrestle back revenue left unguarded for NVIDIA. "After years of neglect, AMD’s workstation group, under the tutorage of Matt Skyner, has the backing and commitment of top management and AMD intends to push into the market aggressively." They have already gained share this year.
During AMD's 3rd Quarter (2013) earnings call, CEO Rory Read outlined the importance of the professional graphics market.
We also continue to make steady progress in another of growth businesses in the third quarter as we delivered our fifth consecutive quarter of revenue and share growth in the professional graphics area. We believe that we can continue to gain share in this lucrative part of the GPU market based on our product portfolio, design wins in flight, and enhanced channel programs.
On the same conference call (actually before and after the professional graphics sound bite), Rory noted their renewed push into the server and embedded SoC markets with 64-bit x86 and 64-bit ARM processors. They will be the only company manufacturing both x86 and ARM solutions which should be an interesting proposition for an enterprise in need of both. Why deal with two vendors?
Either way, AMD will probably be refocusing on the professional and enterprise markets for the near future. For the rest of us, this hopefully means that AMD has a stable (and confident) roadmap in the processor and gaming markets. If that is the case, a profitable Q3 is definitely a good start.
