AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) announced late yesterday that Forrest Norrod, formerly Dell’s VP & GM for Server Platforms would be joining the company to take Lisa Su’s position which she had left vacant after ascending to the position of CEO. That puts him in charge of AMD’s entire Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom business unit (EESC) as well as managing all aspects of strategy, business management, engineering, and sales for AMD’s EESC business.

Forrest Norrod comes from over 10 years of working at Dell and having valuable enterprise and server experience, where AMD needs it most. What will be interesting to see is how he will help shape AMD’s future enterprise and server businesses in ways that will set them up for success, because as it stands right now they are in an awful place in terms of server market share and overall sales. Thankfully for Norrod, AMD is already building ARM server chips and shipping them to customers and is working on new ARM and x86 core IP as well, which should give him and his team even more ammunition, come 2016.

Forrest Norrod – AMD

The truth is that Norrod has a long road ahead of him and there’s no doubt that he’s a qualified person for the job, it also may result in AMD having a closer relationship with Dell and getting more AMD products inside of Dell’s own servers.

After all, AMD currently has quite a good relationship with HP, but that hasn’t been enough to get them serious amounts of enterprise design wins to the point where they could actually gain some market share. It is going to be a very big uphill climb, but it really seems like Su has picked the right man for the job and now we just have to see where it will go from here.

“Forrest is an industry veteran whose strong track record of establishing and growing businesses strengthens our leadership team. Forrest’s unique combination of engineering,” Su said in a press release about the new hire. “Business management and technical expertise at both the chip and system level make him ideally suited to lead AMD into an expanded set of markets where our differentiated technology assets provide a competitive advantage.”

The post AMD Steals Forrest Norrod from Dell to Fill Lisa Su's Old Post appeared first on VR World.

According to Jon Peddie’s latest GPU marketshare numbers for Q1 2014, the add-in board market shrunk 0.8% year over year and a more expected 6.7% quarter over quarter. Most people expect GPU seasonality between Q1 and Q4 regardless of what year it is, but the 0.8% decrease year over year is still an indication of basically flat growth/slight shrinkage. Even though, this is significantly less than in laptops and the overall PC business in terms of shrinkage. for the GPU market as a whole, shipments were down 11.6% quarter-to-quarter, and down 4% compared to the same quarter last year. This is clearly a lot worse than what we’re seeing from the discrete add-in board market.

Additionally, much like we saw in laptop and desktop graphics, the add-in board market saw the complete elimination of two minuscule competitors and their market share. According to Jon Peddie Research’s estimates, the GPU market for add-in boards is now between AMD and Nvidia GPU, period. However, Nvidia was able to maintain their 65% market share over AMD’s 35% marketshare, meaning that over the course of the last quarter both companies effectively sold at the same rate as another, contrary to what some might lead you to believe. Total shipments decreased this quarter to 14 million units with both AMD and Nvidia reporting quarter to quarter shipments decreasing 6.6%.

This is still better, however than the 9% reduction seen in the overall PC market, indicating that desktop GPUs with add-in cards and add-in card sales overall are far less impacted by the shrinkage of the PC market than some analysts would lead people to believe.  However, GPUs are usually a pretty good indicator of future growth since many of these cards have to be purchased prior to their integration, which means that most PC vendors will likely see a fairly flat growth for the next quarter, which is basically in line with most predictions of PC shipments.

The post Desktop GPUs Shrunk in Q1, Nvidia Held Marketshare appeared first on VR World.

According to Jon Peddie’s latest GPU marketshare numbers for Q1 2014, the add-in board market shrunk 0.8% year over year and a more expected 6.7% quarter over quarter. Most people expect GPU seasonality between Q1 and Q4 regardless of what year it is, but the 0.8% decrease year over year is still an indication of basically flat growth/slight shrinkage. Even though, this is significantly less than in laptops and the overall PC business in terms of shrinkage. for the GPU market as a whole, shipments were down 11.6% quarter-to-quarter, and down 4% compared to the same quarter last year. This is clearly a lot worse than what we’re seeing from the discrete add-in board market.

Additionally, much like we saw in laptop and desktop graphics, the add-in board market saw the complete elimination of two minuscule competitors and their market share. According to Jon Peddie Research’s estimates, the GPU market for add-in boards is now between AMD and Nvidia GPU, period. However, Nvidia was able to maintain their 65% market share over AMD’s 35% marketshare, meaning that over the course of the last quarter both companies effectively sold at the same rate as another, contrary to what some might lead you to believe. Total shipments decreased this quarter to 14 million units with both AMD and Nvidia reporting quarter to quarter shipments decreasing 6.6%.

This is still better, however than the 9% reduction seen in the overall PC market, indicating that desktop GPUs with add-in cards and add-in card sales overall are far less impacted by the shrinkage of the PC market than some analysts would lead people to believe.  However, GPUs are usually a pretty good indicator of future growth since many of these cards have to be purchased prior to their integration, which means that most PC vendors will likely see a fairly flat growth for the next quarter, which is basically in line with most predictions of PC shipments.

The post Desktop GPUs Shrunk in Q1, Nvidia Held Marketshare appeared first on VR World.