14 DAY TRIAL // Some truly unexpected things can happen due to semantics and the tendency of the media to write about who shouts the loudest, and a study on who sold which mobile graphics chips proves it.
After all the news about NVIDIA's Tegra processors and Qualcomm's Snapdragon, one would expect them to easily lead the mobile graphics market.
This isn't quite true, not when the “mobile” market means, as Jon Peddie Research (JPR) decided, “smartphones, tablets, and game consoles.”
Qualcomm does have a decent share of mobile GPU sales (26.4%), but NVIDIA only accounts for 2.5%, behind ARM IP (12.9%) and Vivante IP (9.8).
None of them can hold a candle to imagination Technologies though. The company supplied 46.5% of the mobile graphics chips shipped in the first half of 2012.
The explanation behind this is surprisingly simple: NVIDIA and Qualcomm are the only “vertically integrated companies.” In other words, they are the only ones who design their own graphics chips.
Everyone else (ST-Ericsson, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Samsung, Marvell, Intel, MediaTek, Broadcom and Apple) buy GPUs from one of four IP suppliers: ARM, DMP, Imagination Technologies, and Vivante.
Apple, Texas Instruments, and some of Samsung's mobile phones and tablets all use Imagination Technologies chips, hence the ranking.
Granted, Samsung has its own GPU design, but it still buys intellectual property from ARM and Imagination Technologies. In a similar fashion, Broadcom gets its IP from ARM.
All this goes to show that NVIDIA has a long way to go before it can call itself a mobile graphics supplier.
For that matter, AMD has its work cut out for it now that it has decided to treat tablets and other ultra low-power devices as a primary focus.
True, the figures would have been very different if notebooks had been included in the “mobile” category, but those are still PCs, so it is understandable that they would not be. Now we can only wonder where things like Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga and NEC LaVie Y will fit.