For Q3, the graphics processor market grew 22.5% as more than 111 million GPUs, were shipped (versus 91m in the same period last year), says John Peddie Research. Compared to 94m units shipped in Q2, shipments increased nearly 18%, the largest Q-to-Q growth in six years.

GPUs were inside more than 33% of all PCs shipped in Q3.. AMD and Intel were the biggest winners with Y-to-Y growth of 22.8% and 81.4%, respectively. Nvidia saw shipments decline by 6.4%. The biggest losers were small vendors Matrox, SiS and VIA/S3, dropped respectively 16.7%, 35.7% and 84.6%.

GPUs are also used in industrial and medical systems, point of sale terminals, kiosks, digital signs.

Desktop GPUs saw an increase of 4.7% this quarter to 61.9m units. For desktop GPUs Intel increased to 43.9% share, Nvidia slipped to 32.6% and AMD climbed up to 20.3%.

Notebooks
Notebook chips soared almost by 40% Q-to-Q to 49.4m units, earning 44.4% of the total market. In the notebook GPU market Intel dropped one point to 56.2% while Nvidia shipments declined to 21.8% and AMD jumped to 20.9%.

"Q3 is seasonally up as OEMs place orders for chips to build inventory for the holiday season. However, this quarter was up more than any other for some time, and in spite of suggestions of a recession that started last Q4," says Dr. Jon Peddie.

Peddie notes that Q4 will be interesting as AMD and Nvidia probably will not release any more new GPUs (given the large number of intros so far this year), and Intel and AMD have stabilized on their integrated offerings.

Q4 is usually a crescendo for the year, but it could well be flat (compared to Q3) this year, says Peddie.
Go No GPU Recession in Q3

AMD’s quad-core Barcelona chip will become generally available in April, but Intel plays trump with a 6-core processor (Dunnington) to come in 2H 2008.

"We've gone from dual to quad-core while maintaining the same thermal envelope," says AMD. "This is more than just quad-core. It is a significant re-architecture of Opteron, the most significant since we've introduced it."

Intel disclosed several multi-core projects: "Tukwila," world's first 2 billion transistor microprocessor (2X the performance of current Itanium) and “Nehalem,” between two and eight cores and 4X memory bandwidth of today's highest Xeons.

Go Intel MultiCore Strategy 

Intel officially renames two chips targeted at small, portable computers. "Silverthorne" and "Diamondville" are now part of the company's Atom line.
 
With Atom, Intel is feeding demand for a new category of low-cost, e-centric mobile computing devices and thin-client desktops will grow substantially over the next several years.

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