subscribe

Add-in Board Unit Sales Experience a Significant Correction from Q1, Yet Still See Growth Year Over Year

According to a new research report from the analyst firm Jon Peddie Research, unit shipments in the add-in board (AIB) market decreased by -22.6% in Q2’22 from last quarter yet saw a 2.4% year-over-year increase. Meanwhile, Nvidia increased its market share by over 3% in the quarter.

More than $5.5 billion AIBs shipped in the quarter, which represents a decrease of $3.1 billion from Q1’22; this is primarily due to ASPs continuing to fall. The AIB market reached $39.9 billion over the last four quarters. We forecast it to be $44.0 million by 2026. Intel’s entry into the market, due to the strength of its brand and position with OEMs, will create an increase in unit shipments and TAM. This increase will start to materialize in 2023.

Market share changes quarter to quarter and year to year.

Add-in boards use discrete GPUs (dGPUs) with dedicated memory. Desktop PCs, workstations, servers, render farms, mining farms, and scientific instruments use AIBs. Consumers and enterprises buy AIBs from resellers or OEMs. They can be part of a new system or installed as an upgrade to an existing system. Systems with AIBs represent the higher end of the graphics industry. Entry-level systems use integrated GPUs (iGPUs) in CPUs that share slower system memory.

Prior to Q2’22, the AIB market had shown double-digit growth year over year for the previous four quarters, an unsustainable rate driven by the pandemic, lockdowns, and more people upgrading PCs as working from home became a necessity. With people being at home more, gaming saw a historical surge in popularity. As predicted, Q2’22 saw a correction but still experienced growth year over year by 2.4%.

Quick Highlights

  • JPR found that AIB shipments during the quarter decreased from the last quarter by -22.6%, which is below the 10-year average of -9.7%.
  • Total AIB shipments increased by 2.4% this quarter from last year to 10.4 million units and were down from 13.38 million units last quarter.
  • AMD’s quarter-to-quarter total desktop AIB unit shipments decreased -34.0% and decreased by -5.0% from last year.
  • Nvidia’s quarter-to-quarter unit shipments decreased -19.1% and increased 3.0% from last year. Nvidia continues to hold a dominant market share position at 79.6%.
  • AIB shipments from year to year increased by 2.4% compared to last year.

Dr. Jon Peddie, president of JPR, noted, “The continued intermittent disruptions in the supply chain due to China’s zero Covid policy, combined with an escalating trade war between China and the Western world, is aggravating the introduction of new parts. In one sense, that is a blessing in disguise, as the AIB and GPU suppliers got caught with an inventory overhang due to a relaxation from work-at-home demand and the crash of crypto mining due to an algorithm change. As result, it doesn’t look like we will see any stability in supply and demand until the end of Q1’23.”

JPR has been tracking AIB shipments quarterly since 1987—the volume of those boards peaked in 1998, reaching 116 million units. In 2020, 42 million shipped. So far in 2022, over 23 million AIBs shipped through the first half of the year.

Pricing and availability

Jon Peddie Research’s AIB Report is now available and sells for $2,750. The annual subscription price for JPR’s AIB Report is $5,500 and includes four quarterly issues and four hours of consulting. Subscribers to JPR’s TechWatch are eligible for a 10% discount. Bundled packages are also available. For information about purchasing the AIB Report, please call (415) 435-9368 or visit the Jon Peddie Research website at www.jonpeddie.com.

Contact Robert Dow at JPR ([email protected]) for a free sample of any of our reports.

About Jon Peddie Research

Dr. Jon Peddie has been active in the graphics and multimedia fields for more than 30 years. Jon Peddie Research is a technically oriented multimedia and graphics research and consulting firm. Based in Tiburon, California, JPR provides consulting, research, and other specialized services to technology companies in various fields, including graphics development, multimedia for professional applications and consumer electronics, high-end computing, and Internet-access product development. JPR’s Market Watch is a quarterly report focused on PC graphics controllers’ market activity for notebook and desktop computing.