14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since Microsoft declared a holy war on Chromebooks, brand vendors have been furiously unleashing cheap and affordable laptops with mid-range specs and Windows 8.1 on board.
Companies like HP, Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, Acer and Toshiba have all announced low-cost offerings taking advantage of CPUs with integrated graphics. And more such products are coming in the Q4, according to sources inside the supply chain reported by DigiTimes.
More budget notebooks coming our way in Q4 2014
Notebook makers will be concentrating on launching notebooks with prices ranging from $199 to $399 / €155 to €310 in order to attract the attention of customers looking to purchase from the 10-inch to 15-inch category.
This assault will have a series of repercussions and one of the most important is that GPU makers like AMD and NVIDIA will experience a decrease in demand for graphic card products.
NVIDIA and AMD have both taken notice of the trend and are also looking to re-orient themselves to the mid-range market as much as possible, without forgetting about the high-end one.
Since NVIDIA holds a larger share of the notebook GPU market, the advent of low-cost notebooks is expected to impact NVIDIA the most.
Machines boasting CPUs with integrated GPUs are becoming an important threat
The Asian report notes that in Q2 of 2014 global discrete graphics card shipments hit the 11.5 million units threshold, numbers that constitute a 17.5% sequential decrease, which was brought about by the growing popularity of notebooks taking advantage of CPUs with integrated GPUs.
What’s more, these products seem to have managed to penetrate other sectors too, except the budget one. As you might be aware, Chromebooks might have been originally introduced for the Educational market, but enterprises are slowly starting to the take a liking to them.
NVIDIA has just launched its latest Maxwell-based high-end graphics card, the GeForce GTX 980 and 970, which will sell with consistent price tags starting at $329 / €256. On the other hand, the GPU maker has been busy slashing the price off its older GeForce GTX 760, looking to make it more affordable.
On the other hand, AMD’s R9 390X will soon make an entry in the market, but not until the first half of 2015. In anticipation of this event, the company has already lowered some of the prices of its older GPU products.
Maybe these reduced prices will prompt some notebook manufacturers to include the GPUs into their upcoming offerings in the near future.