The CPU and GPU markets cratered towards the end of 2022

[nanoguy]

Bottom line: The PC market has definitely seen better days, but one thing is for sure -- the surge in demand caused by the transition to hybrid work and study is over, and consumers aren't rushing to upgrade their systems anymore. This saw CPU and GPU shipments fall significantly in 2022, but it's unclear if that will lead to any significant price reductions this year.

The pandemic-fueled spending on new PCs and upgrades for aging systems appears to be over as CPU shipments were down 35.3 percent in Q4 2022 over the same period of 2021 and 17.4 percent lower than the preceding quarter. This shouldn't come as a huge surprise as earlier this month we learned that motherboard makers saw their shipments plummet in 2022 with no expectation for a significant recovery until 2024.

According to Jon Peddie Research, there has been a similar story developing for GPUs where sales dropped 38 percent year-over-year in the last quarter of 2022 and 15.4 percent from the three months prior. Desktop graphics card shipments saw a 7.8 percent increase in shipments from the last quarter, while notebook GPU shipments saw a 43 percent drop over the same period -- the biggest observed in over a decade.

There are several important observations, the most important of which is that the overall GPU market cratered last year. Inflation and perceived high demand kept prices high even for last-generation hardware, and companies like Nvidia and AMD decided to launch new models relatively late in the year with the same or lower performance per dollar. As a result, AIB partners shipped 7.4 million units to retailers in Q4 2022 compared to almost 13.2 million units in Q4 2021.

Intel remains the largest GPU supplier in the world thanks to the integrated graphics solutions found in many of its processors, but Team Blue has yet to make a dent in the discrete GPU market. The company is slowly improving the appeal and availability of its Arc Alchemist GPUs, so it will be a while before we have a clear idea of how well they're selling. Meanwhile, Intel is busy working on Battlemage, a new family of GPUs that's designed to compete with Nvidia and AMD's mainstream models in terms of performance per dollar.

Nvidia's share of the GPU market is now 17 percent, while AMD sits at a more modest 12 percent. The two companies made similar gaming revenue last quarter, but the latter will face fierce competition from Intel, which is looking to flood the market with value-oriented discrete GPUs in the coming months. As for Nvidia, its eyes are set on the AI training market where demand for specialized accelerator hardware is on an upswing.

Jon Peddie Research analysts expect overall GPU sales to remain flat over the next few years while desktop models could grow to make up 32 percent of total shipments by 2026.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/97754-cpu-gpu-markets-cratered-towards-end-2022.html

 

[winjer]

Time to raise prices again

 

[Nobina]

We're attributing the rise of hardware sales to COVID lockdowns like people didn't already have gaming PCs, there has to be more to the story. We didn't know how long it was gonna last.

Whatever the case, I hope that the demand keeps falling and people acquire some standards.

 

[takaozo]

People with money to burn already got their cards at 2.5-3 times scalped price last 3 years. I refuse to pay current prices for 2 year old hardware/tech. Last 3 months the used marked got flooded with GPU's, but asking price it's a joke. Almost as you buy new.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

My local Micro Center has been sitting on 4090s for the past week, they're slowly trickling out the door, but it's taking a while. Started with about 25 of them last Thursday and as of today they're down to 9 of that same model, plus the received in 20 more of another model.

The 6950XT are selling for $699.99 and they have 25+ in stock. They just aren't moving even though they are selling for nearly 60% below MSRP.
The 7900XT are all priced $849.99+. They're slowly going out over the 6950XT.

3060Ti cards are all priced at $459.99-$469.99 (MSRP $399 - so they're still over MSRP by 15%)
3060 cards are all priced $359-$419 (MSRP $329 - they are upwards of 27% over MSRP)
3050s are upwards of 52% over the $249 MSRP.

Cripes, these GPU prices are still overly stupid specifically for Nvidia.

AMD the prices are better, but folks just aren't buying because they want something better for the cost or they've already upgraded in the past 1-2 years and see no reason to spend more on something that's not that great of an improvement.

6600XT are priced at $379 - that's the MSRP of them. Better performance value than the 3060 and about 10% faster at 1440p and 1080p.
6700XT are priced at $369 and MSRP was $479. That's a nice price difference in favor of the buyer. $100 less than a 3060Ti and slightly faster by 5-10% at 1080p and 1440p.
6800XT priced at $579 and MSRP was $649. Only about 5-10% behind a 3080 10GB. A solid card by todays standards for 1440p and more than enough for 1080p.

There are some enticing cards out there that aren't priced too outrageously, but still more than most folks are probably willing to spend considering the better priced cards are pushing 2 years old now. It's just hard to say at this point if people just aren't looking to upgrade since they recently did or they're just appalled by the current pricing of the new cards and refuse to pay them and they don't want 2+ year old last gen cards that are still priced fairly high.

 

[yRaz]

While it's disappointing that the 7800X3D isn't going to be released for awhile, these declining CPU shipments will bring the cost of motherboards and DDR5 down. I'm fine waiting for the 7800X3d to come out to have a system with a 5-6 years life span. And who knows what the end of life generation of AM5 chips will look like. If you bought AM3 new back in 2017 and put a 5800X3D chip in it you could potential have a 7-8 year life span on a single platform

But it is nice to see prices come down. I know GPU prices aren't where people want them to be but that's just the market we're in. I'm still a firm believer that if you need a new GPU, the 6700XT can be found for under $350 on most days and is a good buy in the current market. The nVidia nonsense is just that, nonsense. I don't see myself recommending an nVidia product any time soon unless you have to have the absolute best at any pricepoint(4090).

Do feel that AMD is missing a really big opportunity here because even something as small as a $50 price cut across the board would allow them to make some serious market share gains. A 6700XT for under $300 would be an nVidia killer. Many people are afraid to switch from nVidia to AMD for years about having driver issues or the *small* decrease in RT performance, which is used by less than 10% of gamers anyway. nVidia does a lot of brand loyalty and a lot of that was poor driver support on vega and the 500 series of cards. Even there 5X00XT cards were slow and had some driver issues. The 6000 series has made some serious improvements in both performance and driver support, is worth considering. The 6600XT is a solid performer but the price and performance difference between the 6700XT makes it hard to recommend. The 6500xt should largely be ignored esspecially if you still have PCI-e gen 3. I really don't know what they were thinking making it an 8X card. Most people buying that card will be stuck on older hardware so I speculate most people in that price point will be running a PCI-e gen 3 motherboard.

 

[hwertz]

I see several factors in this (besides the general inflation and lets say unusual GPU market at present):

1) It's a hard sell to go and buy a new system when the specs are the same or lower. Obviously you buy a new system and you likely will have a faster CPU, faster GPU, faster RAM and faster storage. But some rando has a system with 750GB-1TB HDD, and 4-8GB RAM (or maybe even 12-16GB). They go to buy a new system and find (to keep costs down) all these systems with 256GB SSD and like 4-8GB RAM? That's not an upgrade and they'll be sorely tempted to keep running that existing system until the wheels run off it. Even worse, you now have all these systems that follow the Chromebook model of soldering the RAM and storage on, so you can't buy a system with dreary storage and upgrade it without doing research first to make sure it's upgradable. Bleh.

2) GPUs -- the onboard GPUs are FAR better than they were in years past. I recently had a AMD Ryzen system (had almost the same CPU & GPU as Steam Deck), running Ubuntu. What can I say? Just like Steam Deck, it ran older games on highest settings and most newer games at medium settings for more demanding games and high for less demanding. I now have an Intel Tiger Lake (Intel Xe Graphics) notebook, I don't think the GPU on it is quite as fast as the Ryzen's but so far the only game I've had actually run poorly on it was Cyberpunk 2077 (about 12-15FPS in benchmark with settings on low -- GPU usage only showed 75% so I'm not at all sure that this wasn't something becoming CPU-bound.) In addition, modern GPUs are such a spaceheater, even if I had all the cash in the world I don't want a "laptop" with some 100W GPU roasting my lap and cooking the battery.

3) GPUs again -- I bought an Nvidia GTX 1650 for my desktop. It's an old potato with Ivy Bridge, I found it had no spare power connectors and a fairly low-watt power supply in it. This was the ONLY reasonably modern card I could find that would run off the 75W PCIe power. Nvidia and AMD could get some additional GPU sales if they made a couple models that really can just be popped into a PCIe slot and away you go. (I note, the GTX 1650 I got, I bought used because the *current* production GTX 1650s switched to a newer GDDR memory that pushes them over the 75W power limit, those ones require an extra power connector to supply something stupid like 5 or 10 extra watts.) (Cyberpunk 2077 on there runs well enough but is comically CPU-bound -- I got a decent 28-30FPS in the benchmark but the GPU was only at 48% usage running it.)

 

[brucek]

Good job consumers at rejecting unexciting and/or poorly priced products.

I don't know how the fixed cost (R&D, corp overhead, other expenses) vs. variable cost (incremental cost of making each new GPU) stack up, but I imagine there's enough fixed costs that selling 13 million units at reasonable prices adds up to a lot more profit than selling 7 million units at higher prices. Maybe they'll learn for next time around.