Q3 Graphics Shipments Up 16.7% Over Last Quarter

By Douglas Perry
published

The graphics chip industry had a much more upbeat Q3 than the disappointing first two quarters in the year.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) estimates that 138.5 million graphics chips were shipped, up 21.5 million from Q3 2010. The year-over-year growth of 16.7 percent was above the 10-year average of 13.9 percent.

The clear winner of the quarter was Intel with a market share of 60.4 percent, up from 54.8 percent in the last quarter. AMD was down from 34.4 percent to 23.0 percent and Nvidia retreated from 20.1 percent to 16.1 percent. Nvidia's drop was largely due to the company's decision to remove itself from the integrated graphics market. JPR noted that Nvidia's discrete graphics chip share was up 30 percent from Q2.

The trend toward multiple GPUs in a single PC is clearly helping the graphics industry. Intel and AMD are driving this trend with embedded processor graphics CPUs (EPGs). According to JPR there were, on average, 1.15 GPUs in PC back in 2001, but there are 1.6 GPUs in every PC today.

Douglas Perry
29 Comments Comment from the forums
  • dlong
    its cus of battlefield 3
    Reply
  • FunSurfer
    9322849 said:
    its cus of battlefield 3

    +1

    ... and they say no money in PC gaming...
    Reply
  • cmartin011
    add me in there soon, 7000 series bought because of battlefield 3
    Reply
  • de5_Roy
    i'd expect bf3 to boost dgfx sales. but right now igp is where the money is. amd profitted from llano and bobcat, intel did with sb. unless nvidia gets an arm cpu with nvidia's own igp they'll keep falling behind intel and amd in this field.
    amd's upcoming trinity, bobcat-t, intel's ivy bridge only move themselves further ahead of nvidia.
    doesn't it make you feel a bit bad seeing intel taking lead in gfx market? intel doesn't even care much about graphics. their drivers suck worse than amd's.
    imo nvidia is in a better position to challenge intel than amd is. they can build a 64 bit arm cpu, combo that with a gts 450 or gt 430 class gpu or lower end gt 240 gpu manufactured by tsmc. i know they will release quadcore tegra cpu which iirc is for tablets and smartphones.
    Reply
  • spookie
    mmm 1.6 GPUs..where can I find that .6?
    Reply
  • hetneo
    de5_royi'd expect bf3 to boost dgfx sales. but right now igp is where the money is. amd profitted from llano and bobcat, intel did with sb. unless nvidia gets an arm cpu with nvidia's own igp they'll keep falling behind intel and amd in this field.amd's upcoming trinity, bobcat-t, intel's ivy bridge only move themselves further ahead of nvidia. doesn't it make you feel a bit bad seeing intel taking lead in gfx market? intel doesn't even care much about graphics. their drivers suck worse than amd's.imo nvidia is in a better position to challenge intel than amd is. they can build a 64 bit arm cpu, combo that with a gts 450 or gt 430 class gpu or lower end gt 240 gpu manufactured by tsmc. i know they will release quadcore tegra cpu which iirc is for tablets and smartphones.I think that Nvidia is in better position to attack AMD in IGP field if they would join with Intel in that effort. Chip-set for SB and IB with IGP that could work in some kind of SLI with CPU's GPU have potential to kill 56xx and 66xx and lower level GPUs from AMD, and maybe even compete with 57xx and 67xx series.
    Reply
  • hetneo
    spookiemmm 1.6 GPUs..where can I find that .6?On average in 10 PCs you have 10 discrete GPUs and 6 integrated, but that doesn't mean that 6 PCs have both discrete and integrated. Some have only integrated GPU, some have 4 discrete GPUs and integrated if you count dual GPU cards, rest have any combination in between (1+0, 1+1, 2+0, 2+1, 3+0, 3+1, 4+0).
    Reply
  • Device Unknown
    Intel is only leading is GFX sales because they have a craptastic IGP in Sandy Bridge. I can only imagine that business, POS, medical, would use Intels IGP. My guess is that AMD is still #1 in graphics chips being USED.
    Reply
  • gh0st
    Make good games/software for the pc,that pushes the hardware and people will upgrade!
    Reply
  • DSpider
    Well, Intel also has open source drivers straight from Intel themselves while Nvidia and AMD have the "nouveau" and "radeon" community-driven open source drivers - which while they are great for older cards, are really really crappy for new ones (at least for a while, until they get proper support).
    Reply