Fermi looks like its going to open new doors for quadro.
NV makes bucket of money off of quadro already. This looks like it might open new doors for revenue because of the added flexibility of the new architecture in addition to the added performance.
I think NV is to some extent correct in brushing off the lead AMD has right now in the directx 11 market. 2 million gpu sounds like alot but even if AMD was making a 100 dollar profit on each card, that would be 200 million dollars(and its probably alot less than this, likely half, considering the graphic card makers have to make money). That not that much money in the grand scheme of things(considering the amount of R and D AMD has to sink in) and although they will pick up some marketshare, if fermi is good enough, it can steal that marketshare back.
The largest reason I think NV can not panic over this marketshare loss is the state of the current gaming graphic arena as a result of the terrible state of pc gaming at the moment. Especially new titles(not WOW), pc gaming has hit a rut and the fuel to purchase new hardware at the moment isn't that high. In the UK atleast, the PC edition of call of duty modern warfare 2 only accounted for 3% of the total sales or in other words, the consoles made 97 percent of the sales.
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/mo...ml?sid=6241052
Call of duty modern warfare has more hype than any other pc game and it still barely sold. In such a dying market, nvidia can afford to lose marketshare for the time being because it isn't that much revenue lost or potential revenue lost. To put this into a much larger perspective, the total retail sales of PC games in 2009 was 548 million dollars.
http://www.gamedaily.com/games/the-s...tores-in-2009/
Considering the sales of any Nintendo game(the new super mario bros has been out 2 months yet it has similar revenue at 10 million plus unit sold), pc gaming is in the gutter.
If the 20 percent thing is true, its actually quite decent considering it is a new architecture. With the programmability of fermi, I can see 20% becoming 40% percent in the future simply because look at the initial drivers of the the 8800gtx compared to later drivers.
Fermi is radically different than past architectures, so the driver team is working from the ground up.
The worrying aspect of fermi at this point is power consumption and scalability. If fermi can't be scaled down to the under 300 dollar market, it's going be ignoring most consumers. NV has to keep the general populous happy, to keep its partners happy. Power consumption is going to be an issue because eventually this thing has to be going in laptops. With more and more laptops being sold compared to desktops, ignoring the mobile markets for a year would be totally stupid since the margins on laptop parts are insane. And of course yields need to get up asap.
