GPU market not suffering from market slowdown

Jon Peddie Research recently released a report about the GPU market in the second quarter of this year. The research firm says the economic turndown didn't have an effect on the GPU market as GPU sales dropped only 0.5 percent from Q1 2008 - that's the smallest drop in eight years. However, that's largely because of high demand for notebook chips. The report states notebook GPU shipments increased 8.1 percent quarter-to-quarter to 35.3 million units while desktop GPU shipments declined 5 percent this quarter to 59.2 million units.

GPU shipments for the quarter totaled 94.4 million units, down 0.5 percent from last quarter and up 16 percent compared to the same quarter last year.

In the overall market (desktop + notebooks) Intel took the top spot with a marketshare of 47.3 percent, up from 37.6 percent a year ago. NVIDIA takes the second spot with a marketshare of 31.4 percent, down from 32.5 percent a year, and AMD saw its marketshare shrink from 19.5 percent last year to 18.1 percent in the second quarter of this year. In terms of GPU shipments Intel saw a growth of 46 percent, NVIDIA's sales soared 11.9 percent and AMD shipped out 7.9 percent more GPUs than a year ago. The bigest losers are VIA/S3 and Matrox, these two firms saw their shipments drop by 84 percent and 23.1 percent, respectively.

In the desktop market the situation is as follows: Intel has 41.5 percent of the market, followed by NVIDIA's 36 percent and AMD with 18.3 percent. On the notebook front Intel is more dominant with 57.1 percent of the market while NVIDIA and AMD lag behind with marketshares of 23.6 percent and 17.9 percent, respectively.