Last week, Jon Peddie Research delivered its Q2 2018 update for total GPU shipments. The data set shows the cryptocurrency boom well and truly over, with desktop GPU shipments falling 27.96 percent compared with Q1 2018. AMD shipped substantially fewer units, with a decrease of 12.28 percent, compared with Nvidia’s decline of 7.49 percent. Intel, in contrast, picked up 3 percent of market share. During the cryptocurrency boom, AMD was supposedly the preferred solution provider over Nvidia and its GPUs suffered higher amounts of price inflation, so the larger decline in AMD shipments makes sense for this reason alone.
But quarterly data, while important and interesting, ultimately doesn’t tell us much about the long-term trends that are powering the GPU market. For that, we’ve turned to Statista and its compilation of GPU market share between the three leading vendors. A chart this large captures much more data, including Intel’s deployment of CPUs with onboard graphics across its entire product stack, AMD’s APU introduction, and the adoption periods for both DirectX 11 and these early years of DX12. So what do we see?
Image by Statista. Click to enlarge.
Let’s break it down by company. As you read this, keep in mind that consumer market share, total market volume, and average selling prices all play a part in company earnings, and market share alone doesn’t tell us where each company held sway or how much they were earning off their GPU businesses....MUCH MORE
Intel is the biggest winner of this comparison. As GPU solutions were integrated on to CPUs, the company’s effective share of the market shot upwards. Back in 2014, we wrote a story about how mobile GPUs were vanishing from modern systems based on how difficult it was at the time to find a lower-end system that still sported a GPU worthy of the name (by which we mean a GPU that would actually provide a meaningful level of discrete performance). From Q1 2012 to Q2 2015, Intel grew its market share from 59.1 percent to 75.2 percent of the market. AMD and Nvidia were accounting for less than 25 percent of the space combined. That state of affairs held until Q2 2016, when Intel’s market share began to slip. The company’s current estimated share is the lowest in over four years.
AMD’s best years are Q2 2010 to Q2 2012. The HD 5000, 6000, and 7000 families launched in this era in the discrete market, with the HD 5000 family having a particular advantage over Nvidia’s products at the time. AMD doesn’t receive the same bump in market share from launching APUs that Intel did, though there are various reasons for that. Relevant intervening variables include the company’s weaker CPU performance at the time, the fact that AMD often shipped dGPUs in mobile SKUs already, and the possibility that AMD could have simultaneously gained market share at the low end from its APU business while losing market share at the high end. We’d need to see market share broken down by price bands to distinguish these effects.
But the large-scale trend is clear: AMD’s market share starts to slip badly after the first cryptocurrency boom, when its GPU prices — but not Nvidia’s — were driven into the stratosphere. We predicted this could happen and the share data proves it. Despite competing well against Nvidia in terms of MSRP and overall performance, the one-sided price skewing (or skewering) made it impossible for gamers to afford AMD cards. AMD’s market share starts to drop in Q3 2013 and it doesn’t stop until the company bottomed out in Q2 2015, having lost more than half its graphics market in less than two years....
AMD $27.23 down 0.83 (-2.98%)
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NVDA $278.23 down 5.47 (-1.93%)
