AIB shipments hit Decade Low in Q4’18, AMD loses share

Market analytics firm Jon Peddie Research has published its quarterly report on world-wide GPU shipments for Q4’18. The report covers sales figures for the discrete GPU market and as it appears, the fourth quarter has been the worst for add-in board partners in over a decade. Among other highlights, AMD lost market share to Nvidia in the same quarter too.

Jon Peddie Research releases its quarterly Add-in-Board report

According to the JPR report, add-in board (AIB) shipments decreased by 10.7% quarter-to-quarter and decreased by 40.2% year-to-year. Based on these numbers, the fourth quarter of 2018 performed the worst and below the average decline over the past 10 years.

“The fourth quarter is normally flat to up seasonally,” said Dr. John Peddie, President, and founder of Jon Peddie Research. “However, this quarter we found that AIB shipments decreased from the last quarter by 10.7%, which is below the ten-year average of a 2.3% decrease. This has largely been attributed to the hang-over of the crypto-mining gold rush.”

The collapse of crypto-mining appears to have had a negative impact on the sales of AIBs that use discrete GPUs. Due the depreciation of cryptocurrencies, GPU mining is no longer worthwhile.

Around 8.8 million AIBs worth over $2.8 billion were sold in Q4 2018. But what about the market share for the two chip (GPU) suppliers? Let’s take a look.

AMD’s Share Declined 6.9% Quarter-to-quarter

During the previous quarter, AMD lost a major chunk of the market to Nvidia. The red team’s GPU share dropped from 25.7% in the third quarter to 18.8% recently, while Nvidia climbed to 81.2%.

During the same quarter in 2017, AMD had claimed a good one-third of the market, according to JPR. However, not much happened during the last year with AMD only releasing a Polaris refresh Radeon RX 590.

Nvidia, on the other hand, introduced a new Turing GPU architecture with the GeForce RTX 2080 (Ti) and RTX 2070. This year, they expanded the lineup with mainstream options, including the GeForce RTX 2060 and GTX 1660 Ti.

Last month, AMD also released a new graphics card called the Radeon VII, which is a $699 compute juggernaut based on 7nm Vega. For mainstream segment, however, AMD is said to utilize its next-generation Navi architecture. Powering the upcoming RX line of GPUs, Navi is expected to hit the market in the second half of 2019.