Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)

Graphics and Chipset Market

The semiconductor graphics market addresses the need for visual processing in various computing and entertainment platforms such as desktop and notebook PCs, workstations and game consoles. The strength of the semiconductor graphics market is heavily dependent upon the market for PCs. Visual realism and graphical display capabilities are key elements of product differentiation among various product platforms. PC users value a rich visual experience, particularly in the high-end enthusiast market where consumers seek out the fastest and highest performing visual processing products to deliver the most compelling and immersive gaming experiences. Moreover, for some consumers, the PC market is evolving from a traditional data and communications processing machine to an entertainment platform. This has led to the increasing creation and use of processing intensive multimedia content for PCs and PC manufacturers creating more PCs designed for playing games, displaying photos and capturing TV and other multimedia content. In turn, the trend has contributed to the development of higher performance graphics solutions. For example, we believe that the enhanced 3D graphics capabilities enabled by Microsoft^® Windows Vista^™ and the increasing availability of “media center” PCs will spur development of advanced graphics applications intended for mainstream users, which will contribute to increased demand for graphics and chipset products.

The primary product of a semiconductor graphics supplier is the graphics processing unit, or GPU, a semiconductor chip that increases the speed and complexity of images that can be displayed on a graphical interface and improves image resolution and color definition. The GPU off-loads the burden of graphics processing from the CPU. In this way, a dedicated graphics processor and CPU work in tandem to increase overall speed and performance of the system. A graphics solution can be in the form of either a stand-alone graphics chip or an integrated chipset solution. Recently, to further improve graphics processing performance, semiconductor graphics suppliers have introduced multi-GPU technologies which increase graphics processing speed by dividing graphics rendering and display among two or more graphics processors.