JPR Reports Increase for Global Add-in Board Market for Q1 2020

The report shows that year-to-year graphics add-on board shipments increased by 7.0% and decreased quarter-to-quarter by -19.5%.

The market shares for the desktop discrete GPU suppliers shifted in the quarter, too. Nvidia increased market share from last quarter, as AMD slipped by -1%. Year-over-year, AMD increased its market share by over 7%. 

Market share changes quarter-to-quarter and year-to-year

Jon Peddie, president of JPR, noted, "The trend of quarterly increases in AIB sales ended in Q1 due primarily to the coronavirus pandemic and the stay-at-home mandates. The effects have been disruptive to the desktop PC and AIB market, but beneficial to the laptop market, somewhat at the expense of the desktop, and AIBs. That has unbalanced the seasonality, but we do not think it will have a major effect on the overall sales for the year.

We believe the stay at home orders are creating pent-up demand. People have increased their gameplay and some new users have begun playing, adding to the demand. However, some of it will be offset due to the record-setting unemployment."

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 dedicated, often large, high-speed memory. Systems with integrated GPUs in CPUs share slower system memory.

The PC AIB market now has just two chip (GPU) suppliers which also build and sell AIBs. The primary suppliers of GPUs are AMD and Nvidia. With the anticipation that Intel will be entering the dGPU market later this year. There are 54 AIB suppliers. They are the AIB OEM customers of the two major GPU suppliers, which they call "partners." Some of the AIB suppliers offer AMD and Nvidia-based products, and others offer only one or the other.

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 offer AIBs as separate aftermarket products. We have been tracking quarterly AIB shipments since 1987-the volume of those boards peaked in 1999, reaching 114 million units when every PC had a graphics AIB in them. This quarter 9.5 million shipped.

The AIB market reached $17.3 billion last year and is forecast to be $18.6 billion by 2023.

Since 1981, 1,311 million AIBs have been shipped.

AIB Attach Rate

The first quarter is normally flat to down from the previous quarter. This quarter it was down -19.5% from the last quarter. That is below the ten-year average of -9.7% which is very low when compared to the desktop PC market, which decreased -5.6% from the last quarter.

JPR also publishes a series of reports on the PC Gaming Hardware Market, which covers the total market including system and accessories, and looks at 31 countries.