NVIDIA, AMD and Intel are the only real players in the graphics industry for laptop and desktop graphics. With today’s introduction by NVIDIA of the 8800 GT graphics cards, computer enthusiasts might find the recently released graphics shipment figures from Jon Peddie Research a bit interesting. John Peddie Research (JPR) states that the overall GPU market was up by 20% with desktop graphics card sales beating mobile GPU sales. With Acer announcing last week that its profits were up in large part due to increased notebook sales across the board this fact comes as a bit of a shock to many.
JPR reports that the total shipments for Q3 were 97.8 million units representing a 20.17% gain in shipments over last quarter. As many tech enthusiasts expect, NVIDIA was the leader in desktop graphics with 37.8% of the market, Intel with its integrated graphics processors claimed 33.5% of the desktop market leaving AMD with only 17.5% of the graphics market.
The 17.5% figure for AMD shows a slight loss in market share compared to the previous quarter. Intel dominates the mobile graphics business with a full 50.9% of the market. AMD trumps NVIDIA in the mobile market with 23.4% of the mobile GPU market and NVIDIA brings up the rear with 22.8% of the mobile market.
"The third quarter of 2007 was the second quarter in a row to surprise us. There was growth in the second quarter, which is normally a slow period, and the third quarter, which is usually good, was a record this time,” said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research in Tiburon California.
The third quarter traditionally includes the "Back-to-School" shopping season, which is often more lucrative for PC manufacturers than the winter holiday season.
"We attribute the market's performance to increased demand by consumers for multimedia-rich systems, and, to a certain extent, to demands of Vista," JPR concludes.