The growing graphics market
Peddie goes on to suggest that: “Intel also wants a piece of the action because as the graphics vendors expand their influence on users and increase the ability of accelerate functions beyond gaming, Intel is in danger of seeing the CPU over shadowed by the GPU.” He also thinks there’s still a market of PC-curious gamers who just need a bit more encouragement.
To illustrate how this can work Peddie points to Vista, which raised the bar for minimum graphics requirement on a PC and even boosted aftermarket sales of graphics AIBs through the sheer force of Microsoft’s marketing will. If Microsoft can achieve that with a new OS, imagine what Intel can do, suggests Peddie.
From this, Peddie and his research organisation – JPR – come up with a forecast that Larrabee will boost the PC gaming market by five percent (1.5 million new users) in its first full year, rising to as much as 33 percent (10 million) after five years.
We think this is credible. Back in the middle of the dotcom bubble, internet companies who advertised on TV soon realised that they were driving people online in general as much as they were persuading them to visit their own site and soon switched all of their advertising online.
Similarly Peddie reckons that just because Intel draws some new entrants into PC gaming, that doesn’t mean they will become Intel customers when they get there. So some of the market share lost to Intel by AMD and NVIDIA should be compensated for by a share of these new entrants.
Furthermore if the market does grow by a third in five years, even if Intel grabs that whole third there will be no net loss to the other two. It’s certainly going to be fascinating to see what impact Larrabee has on the PC market over the next few years.
Do you think Larrabee might end up being beneficial to everyone or will it crush AMD/ATI and NVIDIA? Let us know in the HEXUS.community.
Link: JPR blog
N.B. Intel is presenting a paper on Larrabee at SIGGRAPH on 12th August. Apparently you can access the paper here, but it looks like it's subscription only. You can read the latest HEXUS take on Larrabee here: Intel lifts wraps on next-generation Larrabee: should NVIDIA and ATI be worried?.
