Thursday, May 5th 2011
Jon Peddie Research Discloses Surprising Q1 Results in GPU Industry
Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced estimated graphics chip shipments and suppliers' market share for Q1'11. We found that shipments during the first quarter of 2011 behaved according to past years with regard to seasonality, and was nominal on a year-to-year comparison for the quarter. The situation changed over the course of the year and Q4'10 did not conform to the normal seasonal cycle, but was down a bit compared to previous years, so the growth in Q1 was a welcomed change. Our forecast for the coming years has been modified since the last report, and is less aggressive on both desktops and notebooks.
The quarter in general
The Q3 to Q4 market change of 2008 was the worst the industry has ever seen with shipments down, -35%. Q4 to Q1 in 2009/2010 marked a shift back into a quarterly seasonality situation, albeit below the ten-year average, that return to normal seasonality was amplified this quarter.
Over 125 million graphics chips and CPUs with graphics shipped in Q1 2011. Intel was the leader in unit shipments for the quarter, elevated by Clarksdale, continued Atom sales for Netbooks, and Sandy Bridge. However, on a quarter-to-quarter basis AMD gained market share at NVIDIA's expense.
- In Q1'11, Intel celebrated its fifth quarter of Embedded Processor Graphics CPU (EPG, a multi-chip design that combined a graphics processor and CPU in the same package) shipments, and enjoyed its second quarter of HPU (heterogeneous processor unit) shipments.
- AMD and Intel gained in overall market share at the expense of Nvidia from the last quarter.
- Year to year this quarter AMD had tremendous market share growth, Intel had above average growth, and Nvidia slipped significantly.
- The Q1'11 change in total shipments from last quarter increased 10.3%, significantly above the ten-year average of -4% raising concerns about an inventory buildup that will have to run down in Q2.
- Netbooks continued to contribute to notebook growth. However, the iPad has probably cannibalized some netbook sales.
- Around 83 million PCs shipped worldwide in Q1'11, a drop of 5.4% compared to Q4'10, (based on an average of reports from Dataquest, IDC, and iSuppli) causing speculation on that the 10% up-swing in graphics could be inventory buildup and will have a negative impact on Q2.
The Q3 to Q4 market change of 2008 was the worst the industry has ever seen with shipments down, -35%. Q4 to Q1 in 2009/2010 marked a shift back into a quarterly seasonality situation, albeit below the ten-year average, that return to normal seasonality was amplified this quarter.
Over 125 million graphics chips and CPUs with graphics shipped in Q1 2011. Intel was the leader in unit shipments for the quarter, elevated by Clarksdale, continued Atom sales for Netbooks, and Sandy Bridge. However, on a quarter-to-quarter basis AMD gained market share at NVIDIA's expense.
23 Comments on Jon Peddie Research Discloses Surprising Q1 Results in GPU Industry
nvidia losing market share isn't surprising, amd brought out something new, nvidia brought out a refresh. obvioulsy neither the 6990 nor the 590 sren going to affect the charts at all due to low volume sales on both parts.
Good to see AMD in good shape though...
edit: and is it just me or is intel likly inflating these numbers with the igp on sandy bridge?
We'll have to wait until the Q2 review to see how the Sandy Bridge chipset problems and launch of the AMD Fusion chips affected growth.
*read the underlined part with a ferengi voice
Especially when most PSU in those newer OEM offerings are going to be 300W, Nvidia’s GT440 isn't the most copasetic to performance/power… no one would go that route. Intel and AMD will get the EPG business and then if a purchaser wants an upgrade without a PSU change in some mid-tower that leaves them at a 6670 for best performance/power.
Although, we aren’t be privy to that, because the W1zzard effectively negated to leave such data missing in his 6670 review. And how does the GT440 compare performance-wise to the GT240 it replaced, don’t know that either as again that crucial information wasn’t provided on that review.
Besides, it's not like NVIDIA makes Tesla cards to stock up inventories. Even if inventories exist, they're tiny, and cater to small purchases. NVIDIA relies on big-ticket purchases (when someone's building a supercomputer), so NVIDIA does build-to-order. Even there, a sale is typically 100~1000 pieces.
I think they are going to be fine. They are losing market share on the less profitable market, while they are gaining market share and overall shipments in the 2 markets that are more profitable. They have lots of Tegra sales too, which I think it pretty much covers the lost markets and the overall trend suggests that desktop and laptops are on a decline in favor of the devices that Tegra was created for. Basically Nvidia just got kicked from a sinking boat (* they'll just meet death 10 mins earlier than the rest on the ship).
IMO the low end desktop and laptop market, as the mainstream/highest volume market, is pretty much dead, with maybe 1 or 2 years left of supremacy. The future is low power devices like tablets, netops, etc and there ARM reigns supreme currently or in the near future. And there neither Intel nor AMD have any advantage. The real deal breaker (or not) for Nvidia will be Project Denver. The future of Nvidia kinda depends on that project, but my point is that being kicked off the low end GPU market now is not really important, beause they would have been kicked by market trends anyway and everybody is going to be kicked from that market in 1 or 2 years anyways.Yes but you are forgetting the workstation market bta. That market is big according to the link by Erazer, as big as the high-end GPU market (knowing that for the first time actually surprised me) and profits are much bigger there. There's no doubt then that Nvidia's strategy with Fermi actually works well for them, since I think they have a market share close to 90% and the cards are really faster than AMD's in that department.
Tesla and Quadro cards are really similar and benefit from the same kind of architecture so goign after GPGPU is just a way to sell some more high-end GPUs at a massive profit margin. It's win win really.
Even if they only sell 1000 Tesla cards, at their price that's about $2+ million revenue and most of it is profits, can you even imagine how many GT430's they have to sell in order to achieve $2 million profits? (200k? 500k?) Like the quote above says mainstream cards are there for volume, but volume is not completely necessary. Just look at Apple before the iPod.
And I certainly would imagine “low-end discrete” chips will cease to be new releases, when the 28Nm parts start to show. Might be smart to hold on to any 5570 and GT220 they might have some value in the short term.
I don't think AMD or Intel are going to be able to get away with asking more for the GPU component. I just find it hard to believe that after so many years almost giving away IGPs (compared to the price of chipsets) they will be able to make real money out of EPG. IMO it's just the evolution, something expected by the industry that they had to make even though it's not the most profitable way for them (specially AMD). Of course AMD sees this as a way of increasing their CPU and platform sales which is far more profitable than the low-end GPU market, but let's see if that turns out well. First Bulldozer performance figures are less than stellar so I don't know how good their future CPUs will be, no on die GPU will save them if their CPU component can't compete with Ivy Bridge.