GPU shipments up 18.4% on-year, Intel has over 60% of the market

Jon Peddie Research has released its third quarter report on the graphics market, announcing 16.7% sequential increase in shipments to 138.5 million. That's above the 10-year average of 13.9%, but still in line with seasonal expectations as vendors stock up for the holidays. Intel alone witnessed a 28.5% growth in shipments on-quarter and 36.5% on-year, which is almost entirely comprised of the embedded graphics chips inside its latest-generation desktop and mobile processors. The company has maintained its majority share of the graphics market with 60.4% slice -- up 10.1% from the previous quarter and 9.5% on-year.

Although it has experienced a 9.9% growth in shipments -- thanks to its legion of Fusion APUs -- AMD has reportedly lost footing to Intel with a market share of 23%, down 5.9% on-quarter and flat year-over-year. Shipments of AMD's desktop and notebook Fusion chips have increased 58.4% from the last quarter. Given the rise of CPU/GPU combo chips from Intel and AMD, more computers than ever are shipping with two graphics solutions. Almost 92 million PCs shipped worldwide this quarter, up 8.8% sequentially. There were roughly 1.6 GPUs per computer in 2011, which compares to 1.15 GPUs per system a decade earlier.

Besides its low powered mobile platforms, Nvidia doesn't have a mass market embedded graphics solution to lean on and its shares slipped even further than AMD's. In the third quarter, Nvidia represented some 16.1% of the market, down 19.6% from the previous quarter and slipping some 23% from the year-ago figures. Nvidia's shipments fell 6.2% on-quarter and while its overall stats may not be as impressive as its rivals', JPR notes that the company is placing more focus on discrete graphics processors. In that realm, Nvidia currently reigns supreme, gaining 30% of the discrete market on-quarter and 10.9% on-year.