Introduction
Nvidia has been the driving force in the graphics business for quite a while. It started with the Riva 128 for desktops and continued as NVIDIA brought out new products every six months. The alarming speed at which NVIDIA executed its product roadmap left other graphics chip companies demoralized. As a result, ATI is more or less the only big player that has remained in direct competition with NVIDIA. In the desktop category, NVIDA is the clear leader.
ATI has been dominant in notebooks, where it has enjoyed significant market share since it displaced Cirrus Logic in the first half of the nineties. While the mobile market is not as good as the desktop for establishing a brand name, it is a volume business and, therefore, lucrative - the mobile market continues to grow at two-digit rates. Now, NVIDIA has come to conquer the last bastion of the graphics sector, partnering with Toshiba, a powerhouse in mobile computing itself.