Atom to blame
According to Jon Peddie Research, AMD and Nvidia have lost yet more
graphics market share to Intel. Intel's graphics market share grew from
53.6 to 55.2 percent in Q4, year over year.
Analysts believe Intel's score was boosted by Atom sales, or should we
say Intel's horrid GMA 950, which is one of the worst possible graphics
solutions on the market. Surprisingly Nvidia managed to increase its
share in several market segments, despite the fact that AMD has the
edge and has shipped well over 2 million DirectX 11 GPUs since October
2009.
However, Nvidia's overall Q4 market share dropped to 24.5 percent, down
from 25.3 percent in the previous quarter. AMD was also down, as it
shipped 19.9 percent in Q4, which is only a slight drop compared to
20.1 percent in Q3.
The result is a bit surprising, as Nvidia is in a world of trouble. The
outfit still has no DirectX 11 parts and it's dropped shipments of its
high end products. AMD would have probably done a bit better had there
been no 40nm shortages. However, the yield issues have been resolved and the company could make a dent on Nvidia's results in the current quarter.