AMD to Grab Nearly a Third of the Professional Graphics Card Market in 2014

Apple deserves a 'Thank You' card

AMD has proven itself to be quite the resilient company over the years. No matter how bad the financial situation looks at times, the Sunnyvale chip designer always manages to find a way to stay afloat, and it's not always through desktop and/or laptop processors. AMD's graphics division has been a saving grace of sorts, and by landing a lucrative contract to supply Apple's new Mac Pro systems with FirePro parts, it could end up with a significant share of the professional graphics market.

According to Digitimes and its sources within the upstream supply chain, AMD could carve out a 30 percent share of the market in 2014 thanks in large part to the Mac Pro deal. Each Mac Pro comes standard with two FirePro cards, and since these are high-end parts, the markup is pretty high, too.

It seems AMD is increasingly interested in graphics these days. In addition to scoring the Mac Pro deal, AMD's GPUs power all three current generation consoles (Nintendo Wii U, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One). And on the PC side, AMD's aggressively priced R7 and R9 Series are proving popular, both among gamers and virtual coin miners (Litecoin, mostly).