AMD Radeon GPU market share dies down, NVIDIA domination continues

The entire PC hardware and gaming market exploded in 2020 with the pandemic, with millions more people at home many gamers were upgrading and tweaking their machines like never before. NVIDIA launched new graphics cards, AMD launched new graphics cards that were actually kick ass enthusiast entries for the first time in ages.

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But the issue is, you just can't buy Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards right now. If you thought buying an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series card was hard, Big Navi is a Big Hassle to find worldwide.

The reason? AMD's entire 7nm silicon allotment from TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) would be pushed into their semi-custom SoCs for Sony and the PlayStation 5, as well as Microsoft with the Xbox Series X/S consoles. Not only that, but AMD is using that 7nm silicon for its Zen 3 processors, Zen 3, EPYC, Threadripper, and everything in between.

Radeon is a much smaller importance for AMD, with less profits in it right now given how quickly the cards are selling out worldwide during this shortage. Analyst firm Jon Peddie Research points out that AMD's overall market share percentage from Q3 2020 to Q4 2020 dropped 2.2%.

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But when it comes to the total PC discrete GPU market share between Q4 2019 and Q4 2020 is pretty huge, where back in Q4 2019 we had AMD sitting pretty with 27% but that has sunk considerably, with Q4 2020 having AMD with just 18% dGPU market share. NVIDIA has gone from 73% to 82% in that time.

• AMD's overall unit shipments increased by 6.4% quarter-to-quarter, Intel's total shipments rose by 33.2% from the last quarter, and NVIDIA's decreased by -7.3%.
• The GPU's overall attach rate (which includes integrated and discrete GPUs, desktop, notebook, and workstations) to PCs for the quarter was
• 113%, down -9.2% from last quarter.
• The overall PC market increased by 30.25% quarter-to-quarter and increased 35.76% year-to-year.
• Desktop graphics add-in boards (AIBs that use discrete GPUs) decreased by -3.90% from the last quarter.
• Q4'20 saw an increase in tablet shipments from last quarter.

JPR president himself Jon Peddie explains: "Factors influencing the robust sales of AIBs in the past two quarters have clearly been increasing growth in gaming, and the need to outfit home offices due to COVID. There has been speculation that there might be a renewal in demand for AIBs due to crypto mining. Anything is possible, but the power consumption of AIBs greatly diminishes the payoff for crypto-mining. Ethereum, the best-suited coin for GPUs, will fork into version 2.0 very soon, making GPUs obsolete. A person would be very foolish to invest in a high-end, power-consuming AIB for crypto-mining today".