Q3 Graphics Shipments Up 16.7% Over Last Quarter

The graphics chip industry had a much more upbeat Q3 than the disappointing first two quarters in the year.

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) estimates that 138.5 million graphics chips were shipped, up 21.5 million from Q3 2010. The year-over-year growth of 16.7 percent was above the 10-year average of 13.9 percent.

The clear winner of the quarter was Intel with a market share of 60.4 percent, up from 54.8 percent in the last quarter. AMD was down from 34.4 percent to 23.0 percent and Nvidia retreated from 20.1 percent to 16.1 percent. Nvidia's drop was largely due to the company's decision to remove itself from the integrated graphics market. JPR noted that Nvidia's discrete graphics chip share was up 30 percent from Q2.

The trend toward multiple GPUs in a single PC is clearly helping the graphics industry. Intel and AMD are driving this trend with embedded processor graphics CPUs (EPGs). According to JPR there were, on average, 1.15 GPUs in PC back in 2001, but there are 1.6 GPUs in every PC today.