JPR’s Market Share Report Reveals Moderate Dedicated Graphics Sales in Q1 2017 – NVIDIA Down 27.8% & AMD Down 34.6% Due To Seasonality

JPR Research's quarterly report is out and has shown expected moderate sales in the first quarter. The first quarter is usually a slow period for the GPU manufacturers due to seasonality and saw GPU shipments decrease 17.5% seasonally as compared to last quarter. Interestingly however, the yearly trend also saw a 4.5% decrease with desktop GPUs. This is something that could be construed as a slow-down of the overall market. 

JPR's reports market share for  the PC Graphics Market Q1 2017; Intel's iGPUs fare very well amidst a seasonal downturn

The 4.5% yearly decline of the GPU market was driven approximately 13% by dedicated graphics cards and offset by a 2% increase in notebook GPUs. As far as the dedicated graphics industry goes, the yearly decrease of 17.5% was driven by around 24.81% from AMD, 25.64% from NVIDIA and around 13.91% from Intel. All in all, Intel's iGPUs fared much better than the rest, clocking in the lowest decline that was driven by seasonality. This is actually a very good proxy for PC sales as well and shows that people were actively upgrading their PCs/laptops this quarter.

• The attach rate of GPUs (includes integrated and discrete GPUs) to PCs for the quarter was 136% which was down -4.75% from last quarter.
• Discrete GPUs were in 31.36% of PCs, which is down -4.57%.
• The overall PC market decreased -14.65% quarter-to-quarter, and decreased -1.74% year-to-year.
• Desktop graphics add-in boards (AIBs) that use discrete GPUs decreased -29.83% from last quarter.
• Total discrete GPUs (desktop and notebook) shipments for the industry decreased -25.5% from the last quarter, and decreased -6.0% from last year. Sales of discrete GPUs fluctuate due to a variety of factors (timing, memory pricing, etc.), new product introductions, and the influence of integrated graphics. Overall, the CAGR from 2014 to 2017 is now -9%.

It might appear that AMD fared better than its counterpart in terms of graphics, but that is only if you count the combined effect of dGPUs and APUs. If you segregate the two, AMD's Radeon department fared worse than its green counterpart. AMD’s shipments of  APUs, for desktops decreased -22.2% from the previous quarter. AMD's APU shipments were down -18.8% in notebooks. Desktop discrete GPUs decreased -34.6% from last quarter, and notebook discrete shipments decreased -16.0%.

You can compare these numbers to NVIDIA’s desktop discrete GPU shipments, which were down -27.8% from last quarter. The company’s notebook discrete GPU shipments decreased -23.0%, and total PC graphics shipments decreased -25.6% from last quarter.

Intel’s desktop processor embedded graphics (EPGs) shipments decreased from last quarter by -10.5% and notebook processors decreased by -8.0%, and total PC graphics shipments decreased -13.9% from last quarter. Ninety nine percent of Intel’s non-server processors have graphics, and over 66% of AMD’s non-server processors contain integrated graphics; AMD still ships integrated graphics chipsets (IGPs).

Needless to say, while these numbers may seem grim, they were wholly expected due to the nature of seasonality. We have seen these companies offset cyclical trends on occasion but mostly, routine prevails.