14 DAY TRIAL // GPU sales are one of the big topics of the IT industry, and will stay that way for a good, long while. Mostly because it's always enlightening to see how AMD, NVIDIA and Intel are doing against one another.
It's a pretty ironic situation really. Intel has the weakest graphics technology by far but the largest market share due to how every one of its consumer CPUs integrates a graphics processor of some sort.
It doesn't hurt Intel's case that its CPU with integrated graphics chip business overlaps with the entirety of the GPU market, not just the low end.
And the upper mainstream and high-end markets are considerably smaller than the rest even when taken together.
Because of this, Intel experienced a rise in market share of 11.6% for the third quarter of 2014, in line with this period typically being one of growth.
More importantly, though, NVIDIA's share jumped 12.9% compared to the second quarter, while AMD's fell 7% during the same period.
What this means for the PC market
Compared to the previous 3-month period, the number of PCs with integrated, discrete or add-in GPUs was 155% higher. The discrete/add-in share was only of 32% though, no higher than before. That means that 68% of all PC owners use the CPU’s integrated graphics chip, not an add-in board or discrete laptop card from AMD or NVIDIA.
With the PC market dropping overall by almost 7% between July and September (2.6% on year), that still means that there are now 7.8% more PCs with desktop add-in-boards than before.
The gaming segment was a pretty bright spot, with strong sales for NVIDIA's new Maxwell GPUs. They helped a lot with the new advantage that the company has actually.
All in all, the graphics chip sales are expected to be of 468 million for the whole 2014, That's more than the 454 million in 2013, but not by much. Then again, the 515 million projected for 2017 isn't such a huge figure either.
It makes sense though. The GPU market matured ages ago. That it's still growing instead of staying level is what's more surprising, depending on who you ask.
The bottom line
Many PCs have at least two GPUs in them: the CPU integrated one and an extra, discrete model that activates when anything more strenuous than web browsing is happening. Having released a new GPU and generally doing better in terms of marketing, NVIDIA managed to get the upper hand against AMD in the July-September 2014 period.
