NVIDIA, AMD and Intel All Suffered Sales Drops in Q4 2012

Chip shipments during the fourth quarter of 2012 proved to be rather low, especially for a season when holiday shopping should have led to the results.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) stepped outside the norm for once and, instead of looking at the semiconductor market as a whole or just one sub-type of chip, took CPUs and GPUs together.

What it found was that, overall, the market slid 8% on-quarter.

AMD dropped 13.6%, which is quite a lot and yet, somehow, less than the decline that NVIDIA suffered, of 16.7%.

Compared to those two, Intel actually did rather well, slipping by just 2.9%.

Then again, NVIDIA and AMD have a disadvantage here because GPUs have been getting less relevant to PCs, now that CPUs with Integrated graphics are so widespread.

That said, total graphics shipments fell 8.2% in 4Q12, and 11.6% on year, despite the global PC market going up 2.8% and down just 5.6%, respectively.