PC chipset market to hit $10 billion by 2009

In-Stat is forecasting strong growth in the PC core-logic chipset market from $6.9 billion in 2005 to $10.3 billion in 2009. During this period, continued growth in PCs demand combined with new standards will create a very dynamic market for new chipset designs, the high-tech market research firm said. The challenge for PC chipset vendors is to meet the growing performance requirements and integrate as many features as economically possible.

"In just the next few years, new chipsets will be required to support multicore processors, new front-side bus (FSB) architectures, new peripheral interfaces, and a growing list of features, such as virtualization and security," explained Chris Kissel, In-Stat analyst. "The chipset is a critical component in the PC design and chipset designs are changing rapidly to support these new features driven by changing PC usage models."

A recent report by In-Stat found the following:

The chipset ecosystem supporting AMD processors is growing, while the chipset ecosystem supporting Intel processors is shrinking due to Intel's drive to "platformization"

Although less than 20% of x86 processors have an integrated memory today, In-Stat forecasts that roughly 70% will have integrated memory controllers in 2009, a trend similar to the embedded processing

PCs will shift from traditional AGP and PCI interfaces to PCI-Express, accounting for more than 84% of all graphics interfaces and 98% of all peripheral interfaces in 2009

As processors increase in the number of cores and the amount of memory, core-logic chipsets will continue to integrate more external logic for I/O and other features