JPR: Graphics Card Add-in-Board (AIB) Market Hits $11.8 billion in Q2'21

[AleksandarK]

According to a new research report from the analyst firm Jon Peddie Research, unit shipments of add-in boards increased in Q2'21 from last year, while Nvidia increased market share to 80% from last quarter a 0.3% increase as well as 2% year-over-year.. Over $11.8 billion AIBs shipped in the quarter—an increase of 179% year-over-year.

Add-in boards (AIBs) use discrete GPUs (dGPU) with dedicated memory. Desktop PCs, workstations, servers, rendering and mining farms, and scientific instruments use AIBs. Consumers and enterprises buy AIBs from resellers or OEMs. They can be part of a new system or installed as an upgrade to an existing system. Systems with AIBs represent the higher end of the graphics industry. Entry-level systems use integrated GPUs (iGPU) in CPUs that share slower system memory.



The trend of quarterly AIB sales had been steady to trending slightly down since the crypto madness of the last few years has waned. However, due to the pandemic and the rise in popularity of esports, AMD and Nvidia have been reporting record game segment revenues.

Considering these trends and the addition of Intel into the AIB market we see positive signs overall for the industry.

Both AMD and Nvidia enjoyed an increase in Desktop dGPU shipments year-over-year, and slight decreases from Q1, which could be seen as normal seasonality.

The relative changes from quarter-to-quarter are illustrated in the following chart.


On a year-to-year basis, we found total AIB shipments during the quarter rose 13.4%, that is greater than desktop CPUs, which rose 8.0% from the same quarter a year ago.

The PC AIB market currently has two dGPU suppliers, which also build and sell AIBs. The primary suppliers of GPUs are AMD and Nvidia. There are 54 AIB suppliers. They are the AIB OEM customers of the two major GPU suppliers, which they call "partners." Some of the AIB suppliers offer AMD and Nvidia-based products, and others provide only one or the other.

The AIB market reached $29 billion last year. We forecast it to be $44.1 billion by 2023. Intel's entry into the market could, due to the strength of their brand and position with OEMs, create an increase the unit shipments and TAM Since 1981, 2,094 million AIBs have been shipped.

This quarter is normally down from the previous quarters. This quarter it was down -2.9% from the last quarter. That is above the ten-year average of -9.7% which is a little lower when compared to the desktop CPU market, which increased 1.2% from the last quarter.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Valantar]

Wait, this is rather confusing. Does this company use "AIBs" to mean graphics cards only? Doesn't 'AIB' just mean any add-in-board in a PC - sound card, controller card, HBA, NIC, capture card, etc? I know it's normal to talk about "AIB GPUs" or even use "AIB" as a shorthand in various ways (often for AIB partners to differentiate them from GPU makers, though potentially also to differentiate dGPUs from iGPUs), but for a market research firm to use this term in this way is ... weird. I get that GPUs (and GPU-based compute accelerators) are likely >99% oft the AIB market, but this is still really weirdly inaccurate.

 

[Chrispy_]

Chart's wrong; 11,800B as shown is 11.8T
AIB GPUs are a subset of all AIBs (as @Valantar points out)
Growth numbers are meaningless because foundry production is maxed out and there are no new foundries (they take half a decade to bring online)

John Peddie info is sometimes useful but it this case it is neither useful, nor carefully presented.

 

[Casecutter]

Is it me or expected... all they sell are higher priced SKU's, and mainly to mining so is this really all that impressive?

 

[Lew Zealand]

Apparently 2019 and Q1 2020 didn't exist. So am I a year younger or older then?

 

[Chrispy_]

Good spot. That's graph's even more of I trainwreck than I first thought. The missing dates don't correspond with the COVID production shutdowns in China either.

In fact, that graph is so poor that I question the validity of the data JPR gathered for it in the first place; Calling it "Amateur Hour" is a disservice to Amateurs - No, this is just a negligence-based shitshow.

 

[tancabean]

Wait, this is rather confusing. Does this company use "AIBs" to mean graphics cards only? Doesn't 'AIB' just mean any add-in-board in a PC - sound card, controller card, HBA, NIC, capture card, etc? I know it's normal to talk about "AIB GPUs" or even use "AIB" as a shorthand in various ways (often for AIB partners to differentiate them from GPU makers, though potentially also to differentiate dGPUs from iGPUs), but for a market research firm to use this term in this way is ... weird. I get that GPUs (and GPU-based compute accelerators) are likely >99% oft the AIB market, but this is still really weirdly inaccurate.

In this context AIB means discrete graphics cards just like every other Jon Peddie report. It’s not confusing at all.

 

[Valantar]

In this context AIB means discrete graphics cards just like every other Jon Peddie report. It’s not confusing at all.

Private definitions of otherwise common terms are always confusing. I at least don't spend most of my time reading JPR reports, and thus am more used to more normal meanings of words. I guess YMMV on that, but it's confusing and weird nonetheless.