Nvidia steals ATI's Mobile Thunder

A good year on the move

By Fuad Abazovic

WHO would have thought that Nvidia might take ATI's market share in mobile business? Out of the blue, Nvidia managed to get some strong OEM business deals for its notebook division. We haven't seen this happening for years.

Nvidia's Geforce 7600 got rather popular and more than a few manufacturers are using the Geforce 6150 integrated graphic. Sony and some others like the Geforce 7300 too. Nvidia also dominates with its MXM modules and can put even two 7900 GTX mobile cards together in SLI.

ATI missed a lot of deadlines in 2006 and these are very important in the OEM business. You have to be on time to go back to school, or Yule or you cost your customers money. ATI was all at sea for much of the time year and this affected its market share numbers big time. The biggest problem that Nvidia had was trying to cope with that much OEM business since it is more marketing company than anything else.

Nvidia announced at least one 80 nanometre design - the Geforce Go 7700 with 512MB graphics memory is part of Asus' A8Js notebook. There should be more of these chips in notebooks but we haven't found many. Most of the mobile chips from Nvidia are still 90 nanometre.

ATI is having a strong moment now with a bunch of Turion-based integrated boards and we can see this growing. We see a big potential for a comeback in 2007. µ