Demand for motherboards from Europe and China is weak

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 04/02/2015 09:15 AM | source: | 26 comment(s)

Motherboard players such as MSI, ECS and Biostar are expected to see shipments decline in 2015. The top-2 vendors Asustek Computer and Gigabyte may not be able to achieve their 20 million-unit target of the year as their shipments for the first half are both expected to only reach around nine million units.

In China, PC demand from tier-1 to tier-3 cities had reached saturation, while deployments in tier-4 to tier-6 cities still needed more time to complete.

Because of weak visibility and poor channel sales, most motherboard players have been reducing their orders for the first half. Gigabyte shipped about 4.7-4.8 million brand motherboards in the first quarter, while Asustek's volume came to about 4.5 million. The two players currently account for 80% of China's motherboard market.

MSI and ASRock are estimated to ship 2.8-3.2 million motherboards each in the first half and may only achieve less than 6.5 million units each for 2015.

ASRock is already seeing a slight rise in profits from the motherboard business, but its shipment volume in 2015 is expected to be a lot weaker than those in the previous years. MSI's motherboard business had break-even operation in 2014 but is unlikely to see significant profit growth in 2015.

Seeing weakening demand for motherboards, MSI has turned to focus on the gaming notebook business, while ASRock is developing products for the IPC server market.

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fantaskarsef
Senior Member

Posts: 14593
Joined: 2014-07-21

#5042605 Posted on: 04/02/2015 09:23 AM

Just wait until Skylake with it's new chipset comes out. I bet demand for such motherboards will be noticably higher than for the current lineup anyhow.

But we know the story anyways, PC market is dead, decreasing sales, yada yada yada. :rolleyes:

Barry J
Senior Member

Posts: 2797
Joined: 2006-02-23

#5042609 Posted on: 04/02/2015 09:29 AM

Hardware manufacturers need to push software development as its lagging behind. What's the point of new hardware if your software can't use what you already have.

Fox2232
Senior Member

Posts: 11808
Joined: 2012-07-20

#5042633 Posted on: 04/02/2015 10:21 AM

Hardware today s improperly utilized. APIs have high overhead, threading is still not used much in most of applications.
DX12 will decrease demand for new CPUs which give just 10% increased single threaded performance bump. That as consequence will push down demand for MBs.

At end of this year we get DX12, then gaming part of customers will for another 2 years have no reason to upgrade CPU/MB, because this bottleneck will be removed and main demand will be for more powerful GPUs.

Simple as that, on DX11 with multithreading we can push maybe 2 millions primitives with CPU like i7-4790k - usually up to 800k.
On DX12 even A10-7850k can do 10.5millions, or 6 millions on Pentium G3258.

How long will it take for game makers to use all that and demand more? And when we will see GPUs capable to process that much stuff? R9-290x can process some 20millions primitives, but I do not think this generation cards will keep it that high with complicated stuff.

Edit: Number of draw calls are from 3DMark, so they state per second per 30fps. In other words what I state as 1 million primitives is ability to process/generate 30millions per second. (But that number will not be well readable/comparable due to 3DMark not showing actual draw calls made per second and therefore people will expect their numbering.)

Edit2: Fixed numbers, as I found bench for r9-290x on all mentioned CPUs

da_unique
Senior Member

Posts: 138
Joined: 2006-12-09

#5042634 Posted on: 04/02/2015 10:24 AM

Kinda logical since there haven't been any significant faster cpu's since over 4 years when the 2500k was released.

Megabiv
Senior Member

Posts: 798
Joined: 2006-09-14

#5042650 Posted on: 04/02/2015 11:05 AM

Give me Skylake and i'll them a motherboard sale

. I expected it to be out already but Intel have little need to rush it to market hence the mild refreshes of the i7/i5 series each year. I would pick up a new board and CPU but i've gone beyond the point of no return in that I've waited so long I'll just kick myself if i get one now when Skylake is so close. Same goes for GPU's tbh.

Also as mentioned above, CPU power isn't as big a deal as it was years ago. I don't think my desktop and web browsing can really feel any faster and since games are barely using the CPU potential we have now I feel little practical need to upgrade, but the sweet smell of freshly unboxed hardware is always a lure :nerd:

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