Bottom line: The PC market has certainly seen better days, but one thing is certain – the surge in demand due to the shift to hybrid work and study is over, and consumers are in no rush to upgrade their PCs. system. It sees CPU and GPU shipments falling in 2022, but it’s unclear if this will lead to any significant price reductions this year.
Pandemic-fueled spending on new PCs and upgrades for aging systems seems to have ended as CPU shipments fell 35.3 percent in Q4 2022 over the same period in 2021 and 17.4 percentage lower than the previous quarter. This shouldn’t be a big surprise since earlier this month we learned that motherboard makers saw their shipments fall in 2022 with no expectation for a significant recovery until 2024 .
According to Jon Peddie Research, there is a similar story developing for GPUs where sales fell 38 percent year-on-year in the last quarter of 2022 and 15.4 percent from the three months before. Desktop graphics card shipments saw a 7.8 percent increase in shipments from the last quarter, while notebook GPU shipments saw a 43 percent decline over the same period — the largest observed in more than a decade.
There are several important observations, the most important of which is that the overall GPU market cratered last year. Inflation and perceived high demand keep prices high even for last-generation hardware, and companies like Nvidia and AMD decide to launch new models relatively late in the year with equal or lower performance per dollar. As a result, AIB partners shipped 7.4 million units to retailers in Q4 2022 compared to around 13.2 million units in Q4 2021.
Intel remains the largest GPU supplier in the world thanks to the integrated graphics solutions found in most of its processors, but Team Blue has yet to make a dent in the discrete GPU market. The company has been slowly improving the appeal and availability of the Arc Alchemist GPUs, so it will be a while before we have a clear idea of how well they will sell. Meanwhile, Intel is busy working on Battlemage, a new family of GPUs designed to compete with Nvidia and AMD models in terms of performance per dollar.
Nvidia’s share of the GPU market is now 17 percent, while AMD sits at a more modest 12 percent. Both companies made similar gaming profits last quarter, but the latter will face fierce competition from Intel, which is looking to flood the market with value-oriented discrete GPUs in the coming months. . As for Nvidia, its eyes are focused on the AI training market where the demand for special accelerator hardware is on the rise.
Analysts at Jon Peddie Research expect overall GPU sales to remain flat over the next few years while desktop models could grow to 32 percent of total shipments by 2026.