Graphics add-in board market down in fourth quarter

Quarter-to-quarter shipments decreased 0.7%, and 017.5% year-to-year; Nvidia increases market share lead.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) has announced estimated graphics add-in-board (AIB) shipments and suppliers’ market share for the fourth quarter of 2014. The news was encouraging and seasonally understandable; quarter-to-quarter, the market decreased -0.68% (compared to the desktop PC market, which decreased 3.53% ).

The Nvidia Tesla K40 serves high-end markets which require both extreme graphics performance and general purpose GPU computing. (Source: Nvidia)

On a year-to-year basis, JPR says total AIB shipments during the quarter fell -17.52%, which is more than desktop PCs, which fell -0.72%. However, in spite of the overall decline, somewhat due to tablets and embedded graphics, the PC gaming momentum continues to build and is the bright spot in the AIB market.

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 Q1 2008 to 36% this quarter.

The quarter in general

JPR found that AIB shipments during the quarter behaved according to past years with regard to seasonality, but the increase was less than the 10-year average. AIB shipments decreased -0.68% from the last quarter (the 10-year average is -3.22%).

Total AIB shipments decreased this quarter to 12.4 million units from last quarter. AMD’s quarter-to-quarter total desktop AIB unit shipments decreased -16.0%. Nvidia’s quarter-to-quarter unit shipments increased 5.5%. Nvidia continues to hold a dominant market share position at 76.0%.

Figures for the other suppliers were flat to declining. The change from year to year decreased -17.5% compared to last year.

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 48 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.

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

More information and additional charts are available on the JPR website.