Intel Has a $39 Billion Graphics Opportunity
The graphics card market had been a two-horse race for many years. Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has been at it since the company was founded in 1993, and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) entered the market with the acquisition of ATI in 2006. It's been Nvidia and AMD battling each other since then, with Nvidia generally coming out on top in terms of market share.
This year brought a third player into the mix: CPU giant Intel (NASDAQ: INTC). Intel is not new to the graphics business -- many of the company's PC CPUs include integrated graphics chips, and the company briefly sold stand-alone graphics cards in the late 1990s. But as video games have exploded in graphical complexity, and as graphics cards have found applications outside of gaming, Intel has largely been stuck on the sidelines.
Intel is on the sidelines no more, although there was some sloppy execution along the way. Intel's first graphics card, the Arc A380, targeted the low end of the market and initially launched in China. Gaming performance wasn't particularly good or consistent, and issues with software drivers only made things worse.
Source Fool.com
