Jon Peddie Research (JPR), the industry’s research and consulting firm for graphics and multimedia, announced estimated graphics add-in-board (AIB) shipments and suppliers’ market share for the first quarter of 2015.
JPR’s AIB Report (www.jonpeddie.com) tracks computer add-in graphics boards, which carry discrete graphics chips. AIBs used in desktop PCs, workstations, servers, and other devices such as scientific instruments. They’re sold directly to customers as aftermarket products, or are factory installed. In all cases, AIBs represent the higher end of the graphics industry using discrete chips and private high-speed memory, as compared to the integrated GPUs in CPUs that share slower system memory.
The news was encouraging and seasonally understandable, quarter-to-quarter, the AIB market decreased -8.79% (compared to the desktop PC market, which decreased -14.77%), according to JPR. On a year-to-year basis, the research group found that total AIB shipments during the quarter fell -19.41% , which is more than desktop PCs, which fell -6.52% .
However, in spite of the overall decline, somewhat due to tablets and embedded graphics, the PC gaming momentum continues to build and is the bright spot in the AIB market. The overall PC desktop market increased quarter-to-quarter including double-attach—the adding of a second (or third) AIB to a system with integrated processor graphics—and to a lesser extent, dual AIBs in performance desktop machines using either AMD’s Crossfire or Nvidia’s SLI technology.