Based on sources quoting Jon Peddie Research, it appears that desktop discrete graphic cards shipments have continuously decreased over the last 15 years, in terms of units sold. Per articles linked below, JPR data shows a peak of ~ 97M graphics cards shipped in 2007, decreasing to ~ 73M by 2010, losing ground every year to 44M in 2015.. then a slight uptick n 2017 but back down to ~40M in 2019 and 2020.
I'm struggling with these numbers a little bit as the news and of course self-biased parties like AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and Nvidia are consistently stating that the gaming market has been growing on PC. Besides gaming, I also see multiple reasons for increased demand for Discrete GPUs -- mining demand has been a ramp up over the last 10 years, and professional applications are continuing to find new uses for "gaming" cards.
I don't believe this overall trend is due to price increases per die size over time or R&D costs - there's quite a few years there where price per working chip went down clearly and considerably. (though with exceptions: 20nm seemed a bit muddy cost-wise per Nvidia).
I'm also not convinced this is a pure play to increase the ASP and margin of GPUs sold, at least not over the whole 15 year decline -- it's only the last few years that there has been a hard "pass" of the low end market by Nvidia and AMD to focus on higher end GPUs.
Any ideas what's going on here? Is the demand actually trending down slowly, or maybe it's getting harder to compete for good wafer pricing and availability as the rise of higher margin SoCs first on 'good nodes' (2007-2015) and then leading edge nodes (2015+) has occurred? Perhaps gaming console sales are playing a part here?
Thanks!
Example Article Quoting Jon Peddie Research:
The specific chart from this article (Year over Year discrete desktop cards)
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/kPvLRRbPngV2PYtyPc3MHY.png
Chart showing quarterly shipments - from Q3 2005 through Q4 2020:
I'm struggling with these numbers a little bit as the news and of course self-biased parties like AMD, Intel, Microsoft, and Nvidia are consistently stating that the gaming market has been growing on PC. Besides gaming, I also see multiple reasons for increased demand for Discrete GPUs -- mining demand has been a ramp up over the last 10 years, and professional applications are continuing to find new uses for "gaming" cards.
I don't believe this overall trend is due to price increases per die size over time or R&D costs - there's quite a few years there where price per working chip went down clearly and considerably. (though with exceptions: 20nm seemed a bit muddy cost-wise per Nvidia).
I'm also not convinced this is a pure play to increase the ASP and margin of GPUs sold, at least not over the whole 15 year decline -- it's only the last few years that there has been a hard "pass" of the low end market by Nvidia and AMD to focus on higher end GPUs.
Any ideas what's going on here? Is the demand actually trending down slowly, or maybe it's getting harder to compete for good wafer pricing and availability as the rise of higher margin SoCs first on 'good nodes' (2007-2015) and then leading edge nodes (2015+) has occurred? Perhaps gaming console sales are playing a part here?
Thanks!
Example Article Quoting Jon Peddie Research:
The specific chart from this article (Year over Year discrete desktop cards)
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/kPvLRRbPngV2PYtyPc3MHY.png
Chart showing quarterly shipments - from Q3 2005 through Q4 2020: