A broader agenda
There have been some telling press releases coming from rival graphics chip designers AMD and NVIDIA in the past week.
On Monday NVIDIA saw fit to announce what everyone already knew: that the latest Microsoft portable media player - Zune HD - will have its Tegra chip inside it, providing the "multimedia muscle".
A day later AMD wanted to draw our attention to a piece of market research that had already been in the public domain for a while, declaring that it now has the majority of the market for discrete graphics in notebooks.
When companies start issuing press releases based on old news, you have to figure a broader agenda is being served. If these two announcements are indicative of where each company is focusing its attention right now, we can safely say their respective mobile strategies are going in opposite directions right now.
NVIDIA's attention seems to be given over primarily to the low power sectors, be they netbooks with ION or hand-held devices with Tegra. AMD meanwhile, having sold its hand-held business to Qualcomm at the start of the year, could well be hoping to steal notebook graphics market share from NVIDIA while its focus is elsewhere.
