Jon Peddie Back Pages - It's all about the pixels

What’cha get me for Christmas?

Posted by Webmaster on December 11th 2011 | Discuss
Tags: market facebook mobile tablets games

In the US there is a shark-like feeding frenzy just after our stuff-yourself-till-you-bust national holiday to celebrate the pagan Indians teaching the Protestants how to grow corn. They were thankful for the lesson and so they declared the day Thanksgiving, a holiday, they ate the corn, and as fable has it, wild turkey. That was before Best-buy, Costco, and Walmart. For reasons unknown the day of shop-till-you-drop has been named Black Friday and is the leading indicator of the holiday shopping volume. Holiday shopping in the US accounts for about 40% of a retailers annual sales, and so if its flat…

Sometimes a tablet is just a tablet

Posted by Jon Peddie on November 18th 2011 | Discuss
Tags: market apple tablets amazon media ipad kindle

In the past month and half we have visited three major CAD company conferences in various parts of the world, plus a dozen clients and you want to know what we found? Tablets. Mostly iPads but that’s only because it was the only choice when these companies and clients took it up. All the execs had one (except the CEO of course because as everyone knows CEOs don’t do any real work). The tablets were being used to show design concepts, power point presentations, photos, and AR. Audience members were even using them as cameras. In the not too distant past,…

Of forecasts and thinking about Steve

Posted by Jon Peddie on November 3rd 2011 | Discuss
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We’ve just finished a round of reports, our semiconductor quarter shipments and forecast report Market Watch, our quarterly AIB shipments and forecast report, the mobile devices report, and the HPU/EPG report and forecast. Forecasting is a tricky business and even though we’ve been at it longer than most, it never gets easy, and it’s always scary. We had some brilliant seminal moments where we called the future correctly and one or two where we missed it. Thinking about the future and what trend might happen next, or what technology will come next got me thinking about Steve Jobs. The future is…

Batteries are my best friend

Posted by Jon Peddie on October 27th 2011 | Discuss
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I have referred to the smart phone as a PC—personal companion. But now have expand that title to include the tablet, it too is a PC. So, maybe a smartphone is a PPC—personal pocket companion. As a matter of fact, we have lots of personal companions, battery powered mobile devices. The demand for these devices has exploded creating a market for over two billion processors.: Over three quarters of a billion smartphones will ship in 2016 Feature and other phones will hit 869 million units in 2016 Almost 300 million tablets will ship in 2016 E-book readers shipments could reach 100…

Of hammers, horseshoes and tablets

Posted by Jon Peddie on October 10th 2011 | Discuss
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Do you have a hammer at home? Of course you do, everyone does. You might even have two, maybe three (I have four). When was the last time you bought a hammer? If you’re 40 years old, and you have four hammers, then your average buy-cycle is one hammer every ten years. Doesn’t sound like a growth market, and yet you find a hammer in every hardware store and most general purpose stores, even Walgreens sells hammers. There are websites dedicated to hammers—just hammers. So if hammers are such low volume almost zero CAGR products, why are there dozens of hammer…

The new modality of acquisition

Posted by Jon Peddie on September 24th 2011 | Discuss
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In the 1960s the idea of building a larger company through acquisitions took hold. The model was to build a conglomerate which would be immune to market variations in various segments. Litton Industries, Ling-Temco-Vought, and, ITT were some of the pioneers of the concept. A conglomerate is a multi-industry company, large and usually multinational. The concept although still with us (e.g., GE) has diminished in popularity as investors sought greater ROI and faster stock price appreciation. Whereas a conglomerate can protect you from industry sector ups and downs, it is also is a basket of companies and not all of them…

Party like it’s 1984

Posted by Jon Peddie on September 13th 2011 | Discuss
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The industry is dominated by followers and just one leader Remember the famous ad Apple ran at the Super Bowl in 1984? It featured a woman with the sledge hammer. That was the beginning and the end of innovation for the PC cloners. That was when Apple took the leadership position in PC design, and has never looked back or given it up. Sony couldn’t challenge it, Dell couldn’t do it. The closest the industry came to a contender was HP, but HP lacks one important characteristic—courage—with one notable exception—the all-in-one category they created. Oh wait, Apple did that first too…

The overal CG market will exceed $100 billion in 2014

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 26th 2011 | Discuss
Tags: market graphics mobile software

The computer graphics industry has been a growth industry since it was established the late 1970s. Weathering the storms of the recession of 2009, the CG industry is back on track and showing new invigorated vitality and potential. Computer graphics hardware market reached $53 billion in 2010 and should exceed $67 billion in 2011. The market for CG software was worth $13 billion in 2010 (not counting services, maintenance and other related businesses). CG software is expected to grow to $14.8 billion in 2011 as the industry shakes off the remaining effects of the recession and customers start replacing software tools.…

Discretes are dead–long live discretes

Posted by Jon Peddie on August 9th 2011 | Discuss
Tags: gpu nvidia amd market graphics cpu

The death of discrete GPUs by integrated graphics has been predicted every year for the past ten years and every year for the past ten years, the reports of death have been highly exagerated — even this year. If you look over time at the ratio of discrete GPUs to integrated GPUs (including the embedded GPUs in CPUs like Fusion and Sandy Bridge) you can see an obvious trend. (I’m using the term “GPU” liberally to represent all graphics controller/processors. In reality, we didn’t have GPUs prior to 2001.) But what the chart doesn’t show is the effect of a discrete…

How remote can we get

Posted by Webmaster on July 28th 2011 | Discuss
Tags: ati mobile tablets media pc

In our future world, which seems to arrive every day we are at first amazed by the newest development and then soon jaded and waiting for the next. We live Moore’s law, only faster. (I wonder if Gordon Moore lives Moore’s law, now that’d be ironic.) We know our future world will be one where everything that uses electricity and most things that have warm blood will be connected to the Internet. That will be so we can communicate with them, and they with each other. My car will have conversations with my media server and my calendar and they will…