2006 GPU sales - BeHardware

Jon Peddie Research has published estimation of GPU sales for 2006 and the Q4 2006. If the market progression is relatively modest +0.9% sequentially and +5.1% compared to the same quarter last year, the progression of mobiles GPU/IGP s more than satisfying with +13% for the last three months and +34.1% for 2006. An interesting point is that desktop sales have dropped 4.2% compared to 2005 and 4% compared to the third quarter 2006. In 2006, 83.5 million of GPU and IGP were sold and the repartition is 25.8 million for laptops and 57.6 million for desktops.

Intel's share is 31.8% followed closely by NVIDIA 31% and ATI 22.8%. For the discrete desktop market, NVIDIA's share fall to 53.8% and logically ATI progresses to 46.2% mostly thanks to the Radeon X1650XT and X1950Pro.

For laptops, if the market progression is of 34.1% year-to-year, the discrete GPU progression is "only" of 24.2% over the same period. Concretely, it means that if more and more laptops providing high enough performance to play are sold, proportionally they represent a smaller proportion of laptop computers sold. This explains the fact that out of the 25.8 million laptops sold, 19.7 million have an IGP. Consequently, Intel keeps the market leader position with 49.8%. The second and third places are taken by AMD (23.4%) and NVIDIA (22.9%) who are followed by VIA and SiS who share the remaining 3.9%.

About mobile GPUs, NVIDIA strengthens it position by increasing from 53% to 59.1% compared to the previous quarter. The reason of this position is mostly due the lack of very high end product for ATI who only launched very recently the Radeon Mobility X1900 and is stuck at 40.9%.

All in all, Intel stays the market leader and even progresses to 37.4%. NVIDIA is second at 28.5% and despite the progression of AMD's graphic subsidiary from 20.9% to 23%, the gap between the two manufacturers remains non negligible. Finally, with respectively 6.7% and 4.5%, VIA and SiS are restricted to very entry level computers. Matrox progressively disappear and represents less than 1%.

It is nevertheless important to keep in mind that these figures repent the number of units sold and that NVIDIA, ATI and Matrox average prices are much higher than Intel, VIA and SiS who produce (almost) exclusively IGPs. Value shares would probably be much different.