Jon Peddie Research: graphics shipments plunged in Q4

Waiting out the storm

Graphics guru Jon Peddie has revealed his estimate of total graphics shipments for the last quarter of 2008 and unsurprisingly they show a big drop.

Total GPU shipments for Q4 amounted to 72.35 million, 35 percent less than Q3 08 and 28 percent down on Q4 07. This is the first time in eight years we've seen a quarter-on-quarter drop in GPU volume.

One important bit of perspective to add to the quarterly drop is that many more GPUs were shipped in Q3 08 than expected, so some kind of fall is not too surprising. And then, of course, we have the small matter of the global economy.

"Put simply, the market stalled in the fourth quarter," said Peddie. "Due to the worldwide financial market meldtown, the U.S. housing market meltdown, layoffs, and media reports, the consumer has hunkered down to wait out the storm.

"We're forecasting a strong Q3 and Q4 for 2009 and bracing for what will probably be the worst Q1 and Q2 decline we've seen since the Internet bubble burst of 2000."

Here's a table showing how the individual vendors all fared. Of course they all showed declines, but over the quarter NVIDIA has grabbed a bit of market share back from Intel and AMD.

Vendor	This quarter	Market share	Last quarter	Market share	Growth Qtr-Qtr	A year ago	Market share	Growth Yr-Yr
AMD	14.00	19.3%	22.90	20.6%	-38.9%	18.36	18.3%	-23.8%
Intel	34.59	47.8%	54.95	49.4%	-37.1%	43.71	43.5%	-20.9%
Nvidia	22.20	30.7%	30.93	27.8%	-28.2%	33.78	33.6%	-34.3%
Matrox	0.06	0.1%	0.10	0.1%	-40.0%	0.11	0.1%	-45.5%
SiS	0.80	1.1%	1.35	1.2%	-40.7%	2.05	2.0%	-61.0%
VIA/S3	0.70	1.0%	1.02	0.9%	-31.5%	2.49	2.5%	-71.9%
Total	72.35	100.0%	111.26	100.0%	-35.0%	100.50	100.0%	-28.0%

AMD managed to claw back a percentage point of market share in the desktop GPU market in Q4, but lost ground to Intel and NVIDIA in notebooks, as shown in the table below.

Notebook graphics market share