PC shipments still dismal, but Q2 gives AMD and Intel still up, and Nvidia down: Analyst

While the PC industry as a whole has little to be happy about, the last quarter did bring some companies a little big of cheer.

The biggest winner was AMD, which saw overall unit shipments increased 10.9 percent, quarter-to-quarter, with Intel also seeing shipments increase by 6.2 percent over the same period, claims analysts at Jon Peddie Research.

Things were not so good for Nvidia, which saw shipments decreased by 8 percent. Poor Tegra sales are likely to be a big factor in this.

As a whole the PC market declined by 2.5 percent quarter-to-quarter, but a buoyant graphics industry helped offset this, increasing by 4.6 percent over the same period. 

Overall, the net 7.1 percent increase reflects an interest on the part of consumers for adding of a discrete GPU to a system with integrated processor graphics, and to a lesser extent dual graphics cards in performance desktop machines, claims the study.

However, the average has grown from 1.2 GPUs per PC in 2001 to almost 1.4 GPUs per PC.

Year-to-year, the numbers are dismal. This quarter AMD overall PC shipments declined 15.8 percent, Intel dropped 12.9 percent, Nvidia declined 5.1 percent, and VIA fell 12.4 percent compared to last year.

On a year-to-year basis Jon Peddie Research analysts found that total graphics shipments during Q2'13 dropped 6.8 percent, while PC shipments declined by at a faster rate by 11.2 percent in all. GPUs are traditionally seen as a bellweather of the industry, since every PC has at least GPU, and most of the PC vendors are "guiding down to flat for Q3'13" claims the Jon Peddie Research.

The analysts estimate that the total shipments of graphics chips in 2016 will be 319 million units.