News

Jon Peddie Research Announces 3rd Quarter PC Graphics Shipments

Market Slumps, Intel Soars, Nvidia Makes a Comeback

Robert Dow

TIBURON, Calif–October 25, 2010– Today, Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry’s research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced its estimated graphics chip shipments and supplier’s market share for Q3’10.

Overall graphics chip shipments were an unseasonably one percent down from Q2’10 due to the 8.4% drop in notebook sales despite an 8.4% growth in desktop sales reflecting the increasing impact of the notebook market. The possible cause for the decline in notebook sales could be the iPad, and the related shift from netbooks.

For the third quarter of the year 2010, shipments were 1.24% below the same period last year.

Table 1: Growth rates from 2005 to 2011
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 est
Total Graphics Chips
CAGR ’05-’11:
10.0% 269.4 316.5 351.7 373.1 414.2 473.1 479.4

Embedded Graphics Processors (EPGs – Clarksdale and Pineview) from Intel showed strong growth, up 50% from Q2’10, while total IGPs shipments from all vendors slowed to a modest 1.4% growth quarter to quarter.

Overall, market shifts occurred for all vendors even though the quarter-to-quarter total shipments were basically flat.

Table 2: Market shares
Vendor This Quarter
Market Share
Last Quarter
Market Share
Unit Growth
Qtr-Qtr
This Quarter
Last Year
Market Share
Growth
Yr-Yr
AMD 22.3% 25.0% -11.4% 20.1% 11.0%
Intel 55.6% 53.4% 3.2% 53.6% 3.7%
Nvidia 21.2% 20.7% 1.5% 25.3% -16.1%
Matrox 0.1% 0.1% 0.0% 0.0% 102.5%
SiS 0.0% 0.1% -96.7% 0.3% -99.4%
VIA/S3 0.8% 0.8% -4.7% 0.7% 16.4%
Total 100.0% 100.0% -0.9% 100.0% 0.0%

AMD attributed its slip in market share to weakened demand and OEMs letting their GPU inventory run down to avoid being stuck with leftover processors. Due to real and perceived shortages in supply, some customers shifted their purchases to rival Nvidia. And there may have been some deemphasis on GPUs after a significant weakening of the Euro, with laptop makers settling for cheaper, integrated graphics instead. AMD graphics revenue decreased 11 percent sequentially but increased 33 percent year-over-year.

Intel reported “revenue from client chipset and other” of $1.75 billion up from $1.68 billion in Q2.

“No one knows how much cannibalization there is in tablets,” said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini, “but the numbers are relatively small”. About 4.1 million iPads shipped in the third quarter which is 7% of an estimated 59.2million notebooks and netbooks graphics chips over the same period. Intel’s Atom processor revenues were down 4% in Q3 which some observers are attributing to cannibalization by tablets. In June, Intel announced it would make new chips for tablets, and previewed “Oak Trail” tablets scheduled for release in 2011.

Nvidia’s fiscal quarter, straddles the calendar quarters. Their next quarter ends in October 31.

Embedded Processor Graphics

This edition of the Market Watch report includes breakout numbers for the shipments of the new category, Embedded Processor Graphics or EPG. With the advent of new CPUs with integrated or embedded graphics, we will see the rapid decline in deliveries for traditional chipset graphics or IGPs (integrated graphics processors.) The EPG shipment numbers are included in the total integrated graphics number in this release.