GPU market is growing despite recession

Posted by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 10/27/2008 09:57 AM | Source | 0 comment(s) ]

Recession, financial crisis .. around the globe there's a lot happening. But apparantly it does not effect GPU sales at at all, in fact .. there was a slight increase in overall sales. Jon Peddie Research announced estimated graphics shipments and supplier market share for the third calendar quarter of 2008.

GPUs are used in industrial and medical systems, point of sale terminals, kiosks, digital signs, and PCs. More than one GPU is being used in over one third of all PCs being shipped today. In Q3'08 over a 111 million GPUs were shipped. During the same quarter last year, only 91 million GPUs shipped, and 94 million units shipped in the previous quarter.

That's an annual increase of 22.5 percent and a quarter-to-quarter increase of almost 18 percent, as shown in Table 1.

It's the largest increase in quarter to quarter shipments in six years.

	7 year Average	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008
% Growth from Q2 to Q3	12.30%	-0.48%	18.62%	16.07%	16.20%	11.59%	12.52%	11.58%	17.84%

Table 1: Growth rates from Q2 to Q3 from 2001 to 2008

Market shares shifted for the big three, AMD, Intel and NVIDIA, and put pressure on the smaller three, Matrix SiS and VIA/S3, and still almost everyone showed an increase in shipments as indicated in Table 2.

Vendor	This quarter	Market share	Last quarter	Market share	Growth Qtr-Qtr	A year ago	Market share	Growth Yr-Yr
AMD	22.90	20.6%	17.11	18.1%	33.8%	18.66	20.5%	22.8%
Intel	54.95	49.4%	44.67	47.3%	23.0%	30.30	33.4%	81.4%
Nvidia	30.93	27.8%	29.63	31.4%	4.4%	33.04	36.4%	-6.4%
Matrox	0.10	0.1%	0.10	0.1%	0.0%	0.12	0.1%	-16.7%
SiS	1.35	1.2%	1.90	2.0%	-28.9%	2.10	2.3%	-35.7%
VIA/S3	1.02	0.9%	1.00	1.1%	2.1%	6.63	7.3%	-84.6%
Total	111.26	100.0%	94.42	100.0%	17.8%	90.85	100.0%	22.5%

Table 2: Total Graphics Chip Market shares for Q3'08

DESKTOP
For desktop GPUs Intel increased its first place position to 43.9% share while Nvidia's position slipped to 32.6% and AMD climbed up to 20.3%. Desktop GPUs saw an increase of 4.7% this quarter to 61.9 million units. if we focus on NVIDIA for a second we see that they had more volume, yet did loose market share to AMD.