News

Add-in board-market down in Q2, AMD gains market share

Quarter-to-quarter AIBs down 5.4%, year-to-year 5.2%-less than PCs overall

Robert Dow

TIBURON, CA-August 16, 2013 – Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry's research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced estimated graphics add-in-board(AIB) shipments and suppliers' market share for2013 2Q.

JPR's AIB Report tracks computer add-in graphics boards, which carry discrete graphics chips. AIBs are used in desktop PCs, workstations, servers, and other devices such as scientific instruments. They may be sold directly to customers as aftermarket products, or they may be factory installed. In all cases, AIBs represent the higher end of the graphics industry using discrete chips and private high-speed memory, as compared to the integrated GPUs in CPUs that share slower system memory.

The news was discouraging;quarter-to-quarter, the market declined 5.4%.
The findings weredisappointing year-to-year, declining 5.2%. AIB shipments were down even though PC shipments were up in the quarter.
The overall PC desktop market declined 3.7% quarter-to-quarter including double-attach-the adding of a second (or third) AIB to a system with integrated processor graphics-and to a lesser extent, dual AIBs in performance desktop machines using either AMD's Crossfire or Nvidia's SLI technology.

On a year-to-year basis we found that total AIB shipments during Q2'13 dropped 5.2%, less than the overall desktop graphics decline of 9.3% or the total PC graphics decline of 12.8% overall. GPUs are traditionally a leading indicator of the market because a GPU goes into every system before it is shipped; most of the PC vendors are guiding down to flat for Q3'13.

The quarter in general

JPR found that AIB shipments during 2013 2Q behaved according to past years with regard to seasonality, but the drop was less than the 10-year average. AIB shipments decreased 5.4% from the last quarter (the 10-year average is -8.9%).

* Total AIB shipments decreased this quarter to 14.0 million units.

* AMD's quarter-to-quarter total desktop AIB unit shipments increased 0.8%.

* Nvidia'squarter-to-quarter unit shipments decreased 8.9%.

* Nvidia continues to hold a dominant market share position at 62%.

* Figures for the other suppliers were flat to slightly declining.

The change from quarter to quarter was slightly less than last year. Quarter-to-quarter percentage changes are shown in Table 1.

The AIB market now has just four chip (GPU) suppliers, who also build and sell AIBs. The primary suppliers of GPUs are AMD and Nvidia. There are 52 AIB suppliers, the AIB OEM customers of the GPU suppliers, which they call “partners.”

There are more than 51 companies selling privately branded AIBs worldwide, about a dozen PC suppliers that offer AIBs as part of a system, and/or as an option, and some that offer AIBs as separate aftermarket products.

We have been tracking AIB shipments quarterly since 1987-the volume of those boards peaked in 1999, reaching 114 million units.