Ethereum boom resulted in 31 percent spike in discrete graphics card shipments

The quarterly graphics sales report from Jon Peddie Research hit the web. The company found that Q2 2017 discrete GPU sales were completely out of whack due to strong demand from Ethereum miners. This year there was a huge 31 percent increase in discrete desktop GPU shipments versus the previous quarter:



Usually, seasonality dictates a decline in GPU shipments when going from Q1 to Q2 so this huge spike in demand is very unique. Keep in mind that this report looks at all graphics chips, including integrated graphics. Jon Peddie's more detailed focus on the discrete GPU market will follow soon.

Year-to-year total GPU shipments increased 6.4%, desktop graphics increased 5%, notebooks increased 7%.

Year-to-year total GPU shipments increased 6.4%, desktop graphics increased 5%, notebooks increased 7%.

This is the latest report from Jon Peddie Research on the GPUs used in PCs. It is reporting on the results of Q2'17 GPU shipments world-wide.

Up to now, the GPU and PC market had been showing a return to what has been normal seasonality. That pattern is typically flat to down in Q1, a significant drop in Q2 as OEMs and the channel deplete inventory before the summer months. A restocking with the latest products in Q3 in anticipation of the holiday season, and mild increase to flat change in Q4. All, of that subject to an overall decline in the PC market since the great recession of ’07 and the influx of tablets and smartphones. However, this year, Q2 dGPU shipments were completely out of synch, and remarkably high, as shown in the following chart.

As the chart shows, this is the first time in over 20 years that Q2 has seen an increase in shipments, and never one this dramatic.

The big difference is the impact Bitcoin, Ethereum and other coin miners are having on the market.

Why Ethereum? There was a similar uptick in GPU sales for Bitcoin and Litcoin mining 2013. It drove up sales of GPUs and especially AMD GPUs because of AMD’s GCN architecture favored mining. Low cost application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) were then employed to do the job and that boom went bust, much to the relief of gamers looking for better deals on GPUs. Bitcoin miners who had built large GPU structures for mining, dumped their AIBs on eBay, cannibalizing the GPU market for a couple of quarters. Due to the architecture of Ethereum, that won’t happen.

Ethereum uses a different hashing algorithm to Bitcoin, which makes it incompatible with the special hashing hardware, ASICs, developed for Bitcoin mining. Ethereum’s algorithm is known as Ethash. It’s a memory-hard algorithm; meaning it’s designed to resist the development of Ethereum-mining ASICs. Instead, Ethash is deliberately best-suited to GPU-mining.

As long as Bitcoin process keep going up, new people will be attracted to the mining market. It will eventually flatten out because the ROI just won’t be there. At that point AIB sales for mining will roll off, and we may even see some dumping by the marginal players/miners. And there still is the social issue of what kinds of transactions the miners are verifying.

Overall GPU shipments increased 7.2% from last quarter, AMD increased 8% Nvidia increased 10% and Intel, increased 6%.

Year-to-year total GPU shipments increased 6.4%, desktop graphics increased 5%, notebooks increased 7%.

After years of incursion into the discrete GPU market, it appears the discrete GPUs (dGPU) are gaining market share over iGPUs. The long-term CAGR has been positive, while iGPUs have been negative.

However, some of the increase in dGPU sales has to be attributed to the blockchain mining demand for GPUs. The continued decline in the overall PC market shows up in the integrated GPU shipment numbers.

Quick highlights

AMD’s overall unit shipments increased 7.81% quarter-to-quarter, Intel’s total shipments increased 6.31% from last quarter, and Nvidia’s increased 10.42%.

The attach rate of GPUs (includes integrated and discrete GPUs) to PCs for the quarter was 146% which was up 9.57% from last quarter.

Discrete GPUs were in 35.38% of PCs, which is up 4.02%.

The overall PC market increase 0.12% quarter-to-quarter, and decrease -3.98% year-to-year.

Desktop graphics add-in boards (AIBs) that use discrete GPUs increased 30.88% from last quarter.

Q2'17 saw a decrease in tablet shipments from last quarter.