Settling down
The recurring theme of any technology market research these days is that things are picking up, but there's still a long way to go, and the latest findings from Jon Peddie Research (JPR) are no exception.
There were 16.81 million graphics cards shipped in the second quarter of 2009. While this was 15 percent less than the same period a year ago, that still represents a much better year-on-year reduction then in the previous two quarters and is a three percent improvement on Q1 09 and over ten percent up on Q4 08. Given that Q2 is traditionally the weakest month for sales, that's a good sign.
The JPR report refers to the ‘shock and awe' of the previous two quarters, as the channel dumped inventory like there was no tomorrow. It concludes that, as a result, channel AIB (add-in board) purchases had to at least track actual consumption.
The bad news for the AIB channel is that consumers are looking to spend less on their graphics, which not only means lower-end graphics cards but a shift towards integrated graphics, which saw a year-on-year sales volume improvement of four percent.
Among the vendors, it looks like AMD's latest generation of GPUs, first launched almost a year ago, is finally starting to grab some market share from NVIDIA, improving from 31 percent in Q1 to 35 percent in Q2. NVIDIA initially countered the threat posed by the RV770 launch by cutting its own prices, and only now that prices have "settled out" is AMD starting reap the rewards.
