A new report from Jon Peddie Research finds the cryptocurrency market is continuing to influence the PC graphics market, though its influence is waning. The report found that year-on-year total GPU shipments increased 3.4% and desktop graphics increased 14%, while notebooks decreased 3%.
GPU shipments decreased 10% from last quarter — in terms of individual manufacturers, AMD decreased 6%, Nvidia decreased 10% and Intel decreased 11%. AMD increased its market share again this quarter, benefiting from new products for workstations and cryptocurrency mining. Nvidia held steady, while Intel’s market share decreased.
Over three million add-in boards (AIBs) worth $776 million were sold to cryptocurrency miners in 2017. An additional 1.7 million were sold in the first quarter of 2018. JPR believes that the market for crypto-mining AIBs has saturated and the miners who wanted AIBs have got them now.
Gamers, who have pulled back on purchases due to price increases, are now seeing supplies increase and prices coming back down. JPR estimates that pent-up demand will help mitigate the usual seasonal decline of desktop discrete GPU sales in the second quarter of 2018.
However, PC suppliers, the supply chain in Taiwan and China, and semiconductor suppliers are all guiding down for the second quarter of 2018, reflecting a continuation of historic seasonality and a general decline in the PC market. Nonetheless, the Taiwan supply chain is predicting that the market will hit its lowest point in the second quarter.
The first quarter of each year is typically flat or down from the previous quarter. In the first quarter of 2018, the PC market decreased 10.4% from the fourth quarter of 2017 and was below the ten-year average of -6%.
AMD’s overall unit shipments decreased 5.83% quarter-on-quarter, while Intel’s decreased 11.49% and Nvidia’s decreased 10.21%. GPUs are traditionally a leading indicator of the market, since a GPU goes into every non-server system before it is shipped. Most PC vendors are guiding cautiously for the second quarter of 2018. However, the Gaming PC segment, where higher-end GPUs are used, was a bright spot in the market during the first quarter.
