Graphics add-in board market down in Q1

Nvidia holds market share as total shipments drop 6.7%.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) the industry’s research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, today announced estimated graphics add-in-board (AIB) shipments and suppliers’ market share for the first quarter of 2014.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang shows off the new GeForce Titan Z at the 2014 GPU Technology Conference earlier this year. (Source: Nvidia)

JPR says the news was disappointing, but seasonally understandable as quarter-to-quarter the market dropped 6.7 % (compared to the desktop PC market, which dropped 9%). On a year-to-year basis JPR found total AIB shipments during the quarter fell 0.8%, which is more than desktop PCs( which declined of 1.1%).

JPR’s AIB Report tracks computer add-in graphics boards, which carry discrete graphics chips. AIBs are used in desktop PCs, workstations, servers, and other devices such as scientific instruments. They are sold directly to customers as aftermarket products, or are factory installed. In all cases, AIBs represent the higher end of the graphics industry using discrete chips and dedicated high-speed memory, as compared to the integrated GPUs in CPUs that share slower system memory.

Comparison of quarter-to-quarter growth and add-in board unit shipments.

GPUs are traditionally a leading indicator of the market because a GPU goes into every system before it is shipped; most of the PC vendors are guiding down to flat for the next quarter.

The overall PC desktop market increased quarter-to-quarter including double-attach—the adding of a second (or third) AIB to a system with integrated processor graphics—and to a lesser extent, dual AIBs in performance desktop machines using either AMD’s Crossfire or Nvidia’s SLI technology. The attach rate of AIBs to desktop PCs has declined from a high of 63% in 1Q08 to 45% in 1Q14, up from 43.8% last quarter.

The quarter in general

JPR found that AIB shipments in 1Q14 behaved according to past years with regard to seasonality, but the decrease was more than the 10-year average. AIB shipments decreased 6.7% from the last quarter (the 10-year average is -3.2%).

Total AIB shipments decreased this quarter to 14 million units
AMD’s quarter-to-quarter total desktop AIB unit shipments decreased 6.6%.
Nvidia’s quarter-to-quarter unit shipments decreased 6.6%.
Nvidia continues to hold a dominant market share position at 65%.
Figures for the other suppliers were flat to declining.

The change from quarter to quarter was slightly less than last year. Quarter-to-quarter percentage changes are shown in the table below.

First quarter 2014 add-in board sales chart.

The AIB market now has just four chip (GPU) suppliers, who also build and sell AIBs. The primary suppliers of GPUs are AMD and Nvidia. There are 50 AIB suppliers, the AIB OEM customers of the GPU suppliers, which they call “partners.” In addition to privately branded AIBs offered worldwide, about a dozen PC suppliers offer AIBs as part of a system, and/or as an option, and some that offer AIBs as separate aftermarket products.

JPR has been tracking AIB shipments quarterly since 1987; the volume of those boards peaked in 1999, reaching 114 million units. 65 million shipped in 2013.

For more information on the JPR AIB Report, visit http://jonpeddie.com/publications/add-in-board-report/