While it may seem like little volume is pushed around the channel, this is not the case. Last quarter, NVIDIA achieved $5 billion in sales for the first time in the company's history. About half of this consisted of GeForce revenue. Now there's a fresh report from Jon Peddie Research that sheds some light on the total PC GPU market. The firm takes a look at both the discrete market as well as the integrated graphics market.
PC GPU market up 20.5% sequentially and 29.1% year-over-year
Massive growth was seen in the final quarter of 2020. Usually, the fourth quarter is flat versus the third quarter. Including CPUs with integrated graphics, total GPU sales rose 20.5 percent quarter-over-quarter in Q4 2020, and 29.1 percent versus the same period in 2019. The overall PC market increased by 30.25% quarter-to-quarter and increased 35.76% year-to-year.In the overall graphics market, Intel gained big:
AMD’s overall unit shipments increased by 6.4% quarter-to-quarter, Intel’s total shipments rose by 33.2% from the last quarter, and Nvidia’s decreased by -7.3%.JPR does note that desktop graphics add-in boards decreased by 3.90 percent versus the previous quarter, so the growth described above was driven by desktop PCs and laptops with integrated graphics. Jon Peddie also points out that GPUs will soon be obsolete for Ethereum -- and says it's foolish to invest in discrete GPUs for crypto today:
Jon Peddie, President of JPR, notes, “Factors influencing the robust sales of AIBs in the past two quarters have clearly been increasing growth in gaming, and the need to outfit home offices due to COVID. There has been speculation that there might be a renewal in demand for AIBs due to crypto mining. Anything is possible, but the power consumption of AIBs greatly diminishes the payoff for crypto-mining. Ethereum, the best-suited coin for GPUs, will fork into version 2.0 very soon, making GPUs obsolete. A person would be very foolish to invest in a high-end, power-consuming AIB for crypto-mining today.”