14 DAY TRIAL // The shipments in graphics adapters register increases from quarter to quarter, although some of the leading producers do not do as well as expected. While Nvidia Corp. has the lead on the growth, AMD drops almost 10% lower. The graphics card shipments from the second quarter of this year registered an increase closely followed by an unexpected growth of 20% in shipments on the graphics card market during the third quarter of 2007.
Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research in Tiburon California, stated that the third quarter of 2007 was the second in row to produce surprises in the graphics card market. This year's Q3 represented a record in shipments compared to last year's same period. This comes after the surprise represented by Q2, usually a slow period. "We attribute the market's performance to increased demand by consumers for multimedia-rich systems, and, to a certain extent, to demands of Vista," said Jon Peddie.
Although on the second place on the market with 33.9% share, Nvidia has the best increase of the period - namely 25.1%. First place on the market (38% share), Intel recorded an increase in sales of its chipsets with graphics core by 21.6%. AMD products boosted its shipments only by 17.8% but it registers a 0.4% loss. Although coming third on the market, AMD ships only half the amount of graphics adapters shipped by Intel.
In Q3 last year, ATI was sold to AMD and this was when first it began to drop market. Starting with the fourth quarter of 2006, the company lost even more ground in the graphics market. The ATI Radeon HD 2000-series graphics adapters did not seem to meet their expectations for this quarter and AMD couldn't win back the market share. The company still ships less units than Q4 2006 although it registers a minor increase over Q3 2006.
The desktop market is governed by Nvidia with 37.8% closely followed by Intel with 33.5%. AMD claims the third place with a drop to 17.5%. Since the second quarter this year, the desktop market registered a growth from 68.5% to 73.6%, with shipments of 72 million units. Meanwhile, the mobile market is dominated by Intel with a minor slide to 50.9%. AMD regained the second position with 23.4% and Nvidia comes in at 22.8%. Overall, the mobile market dropped down from 31.5% last quarter to 26.4%.
According to Jon Peddie, "There is little shift in market share between GPU vendors quarter to quarter". The best product of the quarter seems to be Nvidia's G80, which has exceeded expectations. We shall wait to see if the new launched Nvidia's G92 beats the record next quarter, especially since many producer announced their intention of launching GeForce 8800 GT based graphics card in November.
