PC market declines, but AMD and Intel go strong

The PC market is waning, and according to experts, it will bottom out in the near future, offering little growth while laptops, tablets, and smartphones eat up desktop market share.

Globally, PC shipments have declined steadily in previously strong markets, and in Q2 2013 has declined by another 2.5% year-on-year.

However, there are some positives for hardware companies. According to John Peddie Research (JPR), a respected company that monitors the computer hardware industry specifically, the reapings for Intel and AMD are better this quarter than last year’s, leaving Nvidia in a bit of a lull.

	Market share Q1 2013	Market share Q2 2013	Share difference between Q1-Q2	Market share in Q2 2012	Share difference between Q2 2012-2013
AMD	20.6%	21.9%	10.9%	22.7%	-3.54%
Intel	61.1%	62.0%	6.2%	62.0%	0%
Nvidia	18.3%	16.1%	-8.0%	14.8%	8.78%
Total	100%	100%	4.6% over Q1 2013	100%	5.24% over Q2 2013

In a study done by JPR, the market for graphics cards was the most interesting, shifting the positions of AMD and Intel ever so slightly.

The big surprise for Q2 2013 was an 8% unit drop in total graphics shipments (embedded and discrete) for Nvidia, dropping them further behind AMD. This could be attributed to potential buyers waiting for the Geforce 700 series instead of dropping money for what could potentially become last-generation tech, as well as a lack of notebooks with new graphics cards from the Geforce 700 family.

Compared to the first quarter of 2013, AMD’s market share, which includes processors, graphics cards, APUs, chipsets, mobile products, and embedded solutions, increased to 21.9%, which is a result of a slight increase in the amount of graphics cards they’ve sold and buyers snapping up their Richland APUs.

The Never Settle bundles certainly can’t hurt their position either, and the tie-ins from both the Playstation 4 and the Xbox One being powered by AMD hardware probably helped as well.

AMD has also been on the warpath for gamers, using their partnership with Battlefield 4 developer DICE to showcase the game running on rigs powered by AMD hardware. Note that these figures have not yet been affected by any recent developments, so things like the Nvidia Shield and the Crossfire frame pacing Catalyst 13.8 beta driver will only have any effect on the third quarter’s standings.

Nvidia’s Shield won’t save the company’s discrete GPU market.

Surprisingly, Intel saw a single-digit increase in market share. This could be attributed to fans not satisfied with the improvements to Haswell, coupled with the fact that many laptop manufacturers haven’t released their Haswell refreshes yet. Intel hasn’t detailed Core i3, Pentium and Celeron chips using the Haswell architecture, prompting buyers looking for a laptop now to wait for better hardware.

However, this may change for the next quarter because Intel’s Iris Pro graphics has only appeared in a few products so far. Iris Pro fits into a range of power envelopes and could later be found in more laptop, tablet and desktop variants in the near future, but at a steep price. Intel isn’t a graphics company, though, so their drivers still need a lot of fine-tuning and constant updates to make it a viable option over well-supported discrete models from AMD and Nvidia.

Overall, the graphics market is doing quite well for itself, increasing in shipments compared to last year by 5.24% in Q2 2012. However, this isn’t indicative of how the rest of the PC industry is doing. So far, manufacturers are shipping 16.1 million units less than they were doing last year. More graphics chips are finding their way into more computers and laptops, but its not enough to stop the industry from slowing down.