Report: Intel led graphic solutions market in 2011.

The PC market has seen better times in the past and there’s a noticeable slowdown. Tablets and phones, on the other hand, are doing much better. Jon Peddie Research (JPD) has released a report that states some of the facts for the GPU market, that’s probably the second most active part of the PC market, after processors. It states that there was a 10.4 percent drop in Q4 over Q3 for 2011, but at the same time, the year saw a 8.9 percent growth over the previous year. Some of the contributing factors for the slowing pace of the PC market are said to be the Thailand floods, which forced hard drive factories to shut and therefore raised the prices over the months. PC sales and in turn, GPU sales are said to have been affected by these, but the more consistent cause is likely to be the slowing economy.

Intel came out on top with the best market share, thanks to their integrated graphics solutions found on their processors. Intel launched their Sandy Bridge line of processors early last year and those have been successful, there’s also the existing integrated graphics solutions found on the Atom line-up that contributed to this share. Lack of integrated graphics solutions from NVIDIA means most of the focus shifts to discrete graphics solution and this has affected NVIDIA. Ther discrete graphic solutions market has also shrunk down some 12 percent in the past quarter and some 3.5 percent since last quarter the year before. In all, Intel’s market share grew some 7 percent over the year, whereas AMD grew 2.6 percent and NVIDIA dropped some 7 percent - this was due to lack of integrated graphics solutions.

AMD gained market share quarter-to-quarter, whereas Intel and NVIDIA both lost some share. The report by JPD only focussed on graphics solutions for PC components and didn’t include integrated graphics solutions on tablets, smartphones or servers. Intel and NVIDIA are both investing more resources on taking on the increasing popular tablet and smartphone market and that is likely to be the trend for this year. AMD just launched their latest generation of graphics solutions, while NVIDIA is yet to launch theirs.