According to Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the market research firm for the computer graphics industry, the add-in board market decreased in Q3 '18 from last quarter, while Nvidia gained market share. Over $2.5 billion dollars of AIBs shipped in the quarter.
The details are contained in JPR’s quarterly add-in board report on worldwide AIB shipments used in desktop PCs for Q3 '18.
The market shares for the desktop discrete GPU suppliers shifted in the quarter; Nvidia increased market share from last quarter, as well as market share year-to-year.
"The third quarter is normally the strongest from the previous quarter. This quarter it was down -19.2% from the last quarter," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of JPR. "That is below the 10-year average of 14.9% and was caused by too much inventory in the channel due to a misjudgment on the strength of the crypto-mining demand."
Since 1981, 2,083 million AIBs have been shipped.
For the year, $4.4 billion of AIBs have been sold.
Add-in boards (AIBs) using discrete GPUs are found in desktop PCs, workstations, servers, rendering and mining farms, and other devices such as scientific instruments. They are sold directly to customers as aftermarket products, or are factory installed by OEMs. In all cases, AIBs represent the higher end of the graphics industry with their discrete chips and private, often large, high-speed memory, as compared to the integrated GPUs in CPUs that share slower system memory.
The PC AIB market now has just two chip (GPU) suppliers that also build and sell AIBs. The primary suppliers of GPUs are AMD and Nvidia. There are 48 AIB suppliers, the AIB OEM customers of the GPU suppliers, which they call "partners."
In addition to privately branded AIBs offered worldwide, about a dozen PC suppliers offer AIBs as part of a system, and/or as an option, and some that offer AIBs as separate aftermarket products. We have been tracking AIB shipments quarterly since 1987-the volume of those boards peaked in 1999, reaching 114 million units. This quarter 9.9million shipped.
Discrete GPUs are the heart and soul of AIBs, and JPR's “Add-in Board Quarterly Report” covers the market activity of PC-based graphics for Q1 '18. It is available now in both electronic and hard copy editions and sells for $2,500.