[ad_1]
Credit: Dreamstime
GPU sales grew a staggering 20 percent at the end of 2020, driven by pandemic-induced gaming, a new mining craze and high demand for laptops, according to a new report from Jon Peddie Research.
But there is a light at the end of the tunnel, at least for the players. The GPU-based cryptocurrency craze, which has consumed already limited supplies of cards with the speed and cruelty of lobsters, could erupt.
JPR’s Jon Peddie, who has followed the graphics market for more than three decades, said the new Ethereum variant is likely to wipe out the profitability of GPU use.
“Ethereum, the most suitable currency for GPUs, will be incorporated into version 2.0 very soon, which will make GPUs obsolete,” he explained. “It would be very silly for a person to invest in a high-end energy-consuming AIB [add-in-board, in this case a discrete graphics card] for crypto-mining today. “
Still, the demand for gaming PCs and GPUs led to pretty phenomenal growth in 2020, JPR said. Much of the growth in 2020, unsurprisingly, started in the third quarter, during the traditional back-to-school shopping season. With many students still attending virtual classes, computers were even more attractive products than at the beginning of the year, when the close of the pandemic forced people indoors.
That strong third quarter likely created momentum for the fourth quarter. Citing growth percentages rather than unit quantities, the research firm said the fourth quarter saw a 20.5 percent increase in GPU units shipped. AMD and Intel benefited the most: their GPU shipments increased 6.4% and 33.2%, respectively. Total GPU units shipped for all of 2020 increased 12.4% year-over-year.
JPR doesn’t say exactly how many or what types of GPUs were shipped, but it seems likely that AMD and Intel graphics cores integrated with enterprise mobile CPUs make up the largest share. Discrete GPU maker Nvidia’s shipments actually fell 7.3 percent in the same quarter, another indication that AMD / Intel integrated graphics led the rise.
However, don’t feel sorry for Nvidia. In fact, the company saw its discrete graphics market share grow to 82 percent during the final quarter of 2020, compared to its 73 percent share in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Intel doesn’t have a presence in truly discrete graphics yet, so those numbers mean AMD saw its share drop to 18 percent, from 27 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019.
All that enthusiasts care about is sales of discrete graphics cards, none of this is confused with mobile graphics. JPR is expected to take a more focused look at desktop add-on board sales in the near future, so stay tuned.
IntelAMDnvidia tags
[ad_2]
