AMD and NVIDIA sell fewer PC GPUs than Intel in 2020, stock fault?

This Jon Peddie Research report is bad news for AMD and NVIDIA, who have lost sales and thus market share due to shortages of the RX 6000 and RTX 3000, severely impacting sales. Meanwhile, Intel gets a 7% raise.

It seems ironic that Intel will scratch market share in Q4 2020 from AMD and NVIDIA, but this is what this JPR report shows. Both have lost share of the graphics card market, and everything indicates that the pandemic has taken a toll on both, causing users to go with the Intel iGPUs. NVIDIA and AMD numbers are worse than Q4 2019.

The 4th quarter of 2020 leaves NVIDIA and AMD touched, but Intel rises

The prestigious analyst firm Jon Peddie Research has produced a report to assess the growth of shipments of PC GPUs around the world. The general figures are that this sales growth is 20.5% in the 4th quarter, while it is 12.4% year-on-year.

According to their forecasts, we would see an annual growth rate of 3.7% between 2020 and 2025, a 5-year analysis. This translates to we could see a 21% discrete GPU (dGPU) increase in the next few years, is a new market emerging?

In a simple way, JPR has shown 3 graphs pertaining to the 4th quarter of 2019, the 3rd and 4th quarter of 2020, why? The data is compared with the previous year and with the previous quarter of the target quarter: October, November and December 2020. Let's put this data into context :

• In Q3, the new NVIDIA graphics cards had not yet been released.
• In 2019 there was no pandemic, no stock problems.
• The 4th quarter is key because the RX 6000 and RTX 3000 were on the market, so it was the peak of sales.

We did not find the JPR chart very visual, so we have used its data and adapted it to the Professional Review style to make it clearer.

As you can see, comparing the same quarters of 2019 and 2020, AMD loses a 2% share in PC, while NVIDIA loses 3%. Intel grows due to, presumably, the lack of product stock of Ampere and RDNA 2. On the other hand, comparing the data with the previous quarter, we see that AMD and NVIDIA were stable, even NVIDIA scratched a 1% share.

With all this, the source highlights these points:

• AMD shipments increased 6.4% quarter-over-quarter, while NVIDIA decreased 7.3%.
• The general PC market increased by 30.25% from one quarter to another, while in 2020 it grew by 35.76% compared to 2019.
• Dedicated desktop GPUs decrease 3.90% in the last quarter.

The cause of the increase in sales of Intel compared to the RTX 3000 or RX 6000 has to do with telecommuting: more Chromebooks, more laptops and more processors with iGPUs sold. We will see how this 2021 evolves, but the data is not good for NVIDIA and AMD, although especially for the latter because the former has its AI data center business, etc.

What do you think of these figures?