The big picture: The fourth quarter of 2022 financials are not good for many sectors of the technology industry, but new data shows that Intel’s entry into the dedicated graphics card space has not failed. However, what the numbers mean depends on how much you trust Intel’s reporting and how you view the overall market.
Jon Peddie Research’s Q4 2022 report (via Tom’s Hardware) for the discrete GPU market indicates that Intel has achieved a market share similar to AMD, although Nvidia still dominates. If the numbers are to be believed, they suggest a successful freshman effort from Team Blue.
Team Green is still the undisputed master of dedicated GPUs, with 82 percent of the market last quarter. However, just a few months after the launch of the Arc Alchemist graphics card, Intel appeared in the report with a nine percent market share – the same as AMD. Compared to the same quarter in 2021, Team Blue ate up half of Team Red’s market, but Nvidia increased its dominance.
However, research group head Jon Peddie takes Intel’s numbers with a grain of salt. Nine percent of the market comes from company estimates and ASPs, which Peddie considers soft data. AMD may even have higher unit sales than Intel last quarter. Although only a handful of AMD cards appear in recent Steam hardware surveys, no Arc Alchemist cards have surfaced yet.
Total Q4 2022 dedicated GPU sales, which include desktops, laptops, and embedded computers, reached 13 million units – a nearly 50 percent decrease from 26 million GPUs sold in Q4 2021. That fall was higher than the year-over-year decline in other sectors such as CPU and total GPUs (which includes integrated graphics, where Intel still dominates with a 72 percent share of market).
Declining PC shipments dragged down the graphics card market last year despite product launches from all three vendors. Customers have criticized Nvidia’s high-end GeForce RTX 4000 series GPUs for their shockingly high prices. Meanwhile, AMD was only able to get the flagship Radeon RX 7000 cards out the door before the end of the year, so their impact will barely register in the Q4 2022 charts. Both companies are set to launch several mainstream entries in their latest GPU series this year.
Although Team blue has yet to reach AMD, the company has confirmed that it is an imminent target. In a recent podcast, Intel Fellow Tom Petersen acknowledged that they cannot touch Nvidia as they are now but hopes to start a real competition with AMD. Petersen also discussed Intel’s upcoming next-gen GPU series – Arc Battlemage – saying the company wants to increase its market share by adding value for mainstream models. The latest rumors indicate that Battlemage could be launched in 2024.