Turning the tables
It can't be easy tracking the graphics market these days. In the good old days you just had to follow shipments of GPUs - either in discrete cards or integrated into chipsets.
Then Intel and AMD had the bright idea of incorporating them into the CPU, and to complicate things further, a new form-factor emerged that combined a large screen with a mobile chip - the tablet.
Graphics market tracker Jon Peddie Research has reported that PC graphics shipments were down 7.8 percent year-on-year in the final quarter of 2010, and called the figures ‘disappointing'.
As you can see from the table below, both Intel and NVIDIA were significant contributors to this trend. NVIDIA's IGP business is in decline, thanks to disputes with Intel and the integration of graphics into the CPU. Meanwhile it has been losing ground to AMD in discrete graphics for a while. Intel doesn't do discrete, of course, so its quarter-on-quarter slump must be down to weak PC sales.
A slow-down in PC sales had been predicted for the second half of last year, but a broader underlying trend may have been exaggerated by tablets. There is growing evidence that tablets are eating into the low-end notebook/netbook market. While a tablet won't replace most people's main productivity PC, it definitely seems to be transforming the ‘secondary device' market.
There is currently an unresolved debate over whether tablets should be classified as PCs. On one hand they run on mobile chips and OSs, lack hard keyboards and seem to be used primarily for media consumption, on the other they perform many of the functions of a notebook and are too big to be called phones. Let us know what you think: are tablets PC and if not what are they? Our opinion is that they represent a new category.
Despite the disappointing Q4 figures, JPR still expects 2011 to be a strong year for graphics. It reckons the full adoption of DX 11 for mainstream systems will boost discrete sales, while "AMDs Fusion and Intel's Sandy Bridge should hit their stride." Of course, if you include the GPUs inside application processors such as Snapdragon, Tegra or A4 then you'll get a much bigger number.
|
Vendor |
This Quarter Market share |
last Quarter Market share |
Unit Growth Qtr-Qtr |
This quarter last year Market share |
Growth Yr-Y |
|
AMD |
24.2% |
23.0% |
2.3% |
21.7% |
11.2% |
|
Intel |
52.5% |
55.2% |
-7.3% |
51.1% |
2.9% |
|
Nvidia |
22.5% |
21.0% |
4.1% |
26.5% |
-15.1% |
|
Matrox |
0.1% |
0.1% |
0.0% |
0.0% |
30.1% |
|
SiS |
0.0% |
0.0% |
-100.0% |
0.0% |
-100.0% |
|
VIA/S3 |
0.8% |
0.8% |
-1.9% |
0.7% |
19.5% |
|
Total |
100.0% |
100.0% |
-2.6% |
100.0% |
0.0% |
