The rich get richer
We're a little late in picking up on the Jon Peddie Research graphics market figures this quarter, but they're worth a look regardless.
The long and short of it is that the graphics market was surprisingly strong in Q2, which is traditionally a weak quarter, with shipments up 6.3 percent. Part of this is down to surprising strength in PC shipments, which were up 2.4 percent, but the growing ubiquity of integrated CPU/GPU chips seems to also be a factor.
Intel, despite its abortive Larrabee project, doesn't make discrete graphics. And yet the big winner in terms of market share once more was Intel, shipping almost 20 percent more graphics chips than the previous quarter. These will mainly have been SPUs integrated into Sandy Bridge chips, but there's also PineView Atom chips.
This performance granted Intel a massive six additional percentage points of market share over the course of the quarter. AMD lost 3.5 percentage points and NVIDIA 2.4. There are now 1.6 GPUs per PC on average.
One of the reasons given for the graphics market deviating from historical trends is tablets. Market watchers are still trying to work out how to categorise them, let alone how to account for their impact on other form-factors. While they use smartphone chips and platforms, they're far more likely to impact low-end notebook sales than smartphone ones.
|
Market share this quarter |
Market share last Qtr |
Unit Change Qtr-Qtr |
Share Change Qtr-Qtr |
Market Share last yr |
AMD |
21.2% |
24.7% |
-7.3% |
-13.9% |
24.7% |
Intel |
60.7% |
54.7% |
19.6% |
11.0% |
52.9% |
Nvidia |
17.5% |
19.9% |
-5.3% |
-12.1% |
21.4% |
Matrox |
0.04% |
0.0% |
-8.3% |
-14.9% |
0.1% |
SiS |
0.0% |
0.0% |
0.0% |
0.0% |
0.1% |
VIA/S3 |
0.5% |
0.7% |
-20.1% |
-25.8% |
0.8% |
Total |
100.0% |
100.0% |
7.7% |
|
100.0% |