AMD Targets Workstation Graphics Market

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- During the Academy Awards season, graphics chip vendor Nvidia enjoyed its share of Oscar glory by noting that all three films up for the Best Visual Effects award ("Avatar," "Star Trek," and "District 9") used Nvidia cards to process those Oscar-nominated effects.

Its rival AMD (NYSE: AMD) now wants a piece of that action, and in a briefing here at its headquarters, announced the first of several initiatives to significantly ramp up its efforts in the professional graphics market with a series of new cards from its graphics business unit, ATI. These new cards will be sold under the company's existing workstation product band, FirePro.

The market in question isn't as prominent as the opportunity in the video game industry, but it is just as performance-obsessed. CAD/CAM, visual effects, computer graphics, animation and medical imaging all require every last gigahertz of power -- and more. As a result, these machines are a lot more decked out and more expensive than your typical desktop at Best Buy.

And even if the number of units moved by the industry can't compared to the gaming sector, the products can still make for a lucrative field for the likes of AMD and Nvidia. Market researcher Jon Peddie Research, which focuses on the graphics industry, estimates that 716,000 workstation units shipped during the fourth quarter of 2009 for an estimated value of $1.52 billion, which comes out to an average price of $2,122 per machine.

"Workstations cost a lot of money because they go to the most precious employees, and they are precious because of their productivity, so those computers have to be rock-solid and bulletproof," said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.

So what's taken AMD so long to make a serious play for the high-end professional graphics market? The delay hasn't been due to a lack of a high-performance card: The ATI Radeon 5700 and 5800 HD cards have been very well-reviewed by gamer and enthusiast sites. The problem was that AMD has only now begun collecting the quality assurance certifications necessary to become a serious contender in the space -- specifically, certification of its drivers and support from the professional graphics market's key application vendors.

Having what's known as independent software vendor (ISV) certifications reassures buyers that AMD's cards will work with their apps, and that's a key selling point in this space: If a game crashes due to a bad driver, it's an inconvenience, but if a 5GB CAD design crashes, it's hours of lost work.

"A user has to know, when they call a software vendor, they will get support they need for the whole solution in the stack," Janet Matsuda, director of workstation graphics at AMD, said during a briefing here at the company's headquarters. She added that AMD works with software vendors, giving them hardware for testing as well as performing its own tests of the software, including writing custom drivers and doing application-specific tuning.

Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist with In-Stat, also said AMD had other concerns to address before taking on this market -- such as coping with its widely publicized business problems.

"They are significantly more resource-constrained than Intel or Nvidia, and they had more fish to fry. Look at what they've been through in the last two years. You could argue there's a lot of things they could have done but they just had to focus their efforts," he told InternetNews.com.

Now, though, he thinks the ATI group "is the most exciting part of AMD right now. They got everything lined up right for this announcement."

New FirePro Graphics Cards

AMD is kicking off its new push into desktop performance graphics with the FirePro V8800 ($1,499), a new offering based on the current generation of Radeon 5x00 graphics cards. The latter have a feature called Eyefinity, which lets one graphics card power up to six monitors, which can then either display six different screens or one massive image. The 8800, meanwhile, has four video output ports, each with 2GB of memory and support for resolutions up to 2560x1600.

The card also has a feature called AutoDetect, which does what its name implies: It detects applications being opened or brought to the forefront and loads optimized settings for that application, if it supports it.

Support will come in the form of DirectX 11, Microsoft's graphics library, as well as OpenGL 4.0 and OpenCL 1.0. OpenGL is a desktop graphics library developed by SGI back in the 1990s and now controlled by a consortium called the Khronos Group. OpenGL 4.0 shipped earlier this month, featuring performance improvements in shaders and pixel rendering. OpenCL is a library also from Khronos that utilizes both the CPU and GPU to process an application.

AMD has already released a new mobile graphics processor as part of its new initiative: the FirePro M7820 mobile processor for high-end laptops. The M7820 has 1GB of frame buffer memory and supports three displays when undocked, or up to five displays when in a docking station.

The FirePro M7820's first customer is HP (NYSE: HPQ), with its EliteBook 8720w, a $1,999 notebook meant for high-end power users. The model sports a Core i7 processor and up to 16GB of memory.

Both HP and Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) will introduce new workstations running the FirePro cards later this month. The two companies make up the bulk of the desktop workstation market and are both customers of Nvidia as well.

Andy Patrizio is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.