14 DAY TRIAL // The graphics industry has nothing to worry about, or so claim the quarterly sales reports released by Jon Peddie Research (JPR). The market leaders are Nvidia and Intel, who accounted for a combined 77.1% of all graphics processors sold during the last three months of 2007. AMD's graphics division, ATI is right behind, but is experiencing dramatic shipment decline and market share loss.
It seems that more than 106.4 million graphics chips hit the market during the fourth quarter of 2007, 27 percent more than in the previous year (only 83.5 million units shipped). The notebook industry got its share of 39.6 million GPUs, that is 37.2% of the actual chip production. According to the market research company, this is the result of a spectacular explosion in the notebooks market, that sell better year after year.
Intel and Nvidia continue to rule the graphics market, while taking all the benefits from it. They are also the main innovators in the field and had a notable impact over how today's graphics perform. Intel leads the chipset market, which also makes it the largest graphics chip manufacturer. Jon Peddie Research claims that the largest x86 chip manufacturer has shipped 43.7 million graphics processors during the last quarter of 2007, which accounts for a 43.5% market share.
Intel increased its GPU shipments by 40.2% as compared to the last quarter of 2006. Nvidia could only ship 33.8 million chips during the last quarter, which brings a total market share of 33.6%, with a 42.3% year over year growth.
AMD surely had a bad quarter. Not only did the company have to face a failed launch in its CPU business, but graphics shipments went down, from 19.2 million in Q4 2006 to 18.6 million in Q4 2007.
"The fourth quarter of 2007 was seasonally good, and saw significantly greater sequential growth from the third quarter compared to last year. This is especially interesting since Q3 2007 was so good," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "The major growth in the desktop segments was for Mainstream and Value class add-in boards as is typical for the holiday period."
The market research company claimed that 2007 was a good year for the graphics industry, but these increases in chip sales are highly unlikely to continue during 2008 at the same pace.