NVIDIA Analyst Day: Jen-sun Goes to the Mat With Intel

Tackling the Market Share Myth

Largely, 2007 and 2008 have been big years for NVIDIA's growth. With the rock solid performance domination of G80 since the last quarter of 2006 - a situation that is largely unheard of in the usually very fast paced and aggressive graphics market - confidence in NVIDIA (or rather a lack of confidence in the competition) has helped bolster their position in the industry as a whole. AMD certainly still offers some good price/performance alternatives in the midrange, as they can compete in price with the added flexibility of their smaller GPU and fab process. But they don't have the high margin high end market or the mind share to match NVIDIA right now.

The market gains made by the NVIDIA juggernaut combine with some interesting insight into sales data have combined to show NVIDIA as the current king of the roost in terms of desktop graphics sales. For a long time, Intel had been able to claim that it shipped a higher volume of computer graphics hardware than anyone in the world. This is true due to the pervasiveness of Intel's integrated chipsets on the desktop and in mobile solutions. Intel does offer a good solution for people who are uninterested in graphics performance or quality. They offer a 2D solution that supports a minimal set of DirectX features but, as Jen-sun said, "is a joke" when compared to any real 3D hardware.

So what's different aside from the already clear gains NVIDIA has made in the market place? NVIDIA says that something called double attachment is much to blame for inaccuracy of the data spread by Intel and analysts. Jen-sun claims that a huge proportion of Intel motherboards with include integrated graphics have discrete graphics cards plugged into them. The idea is that Intel basically gives away their integrated hardware and there's no reason not to ship it in a system. But shipments say nothing to illustrate the actual usage of these parts.

As an example, Jen-sun made the point that if Intel integrates a tiny graphics core on to all their CPUs, they would be able to claim 100% market share of graphics running on Intel systems using their current logic. The problem is that if you give away crap it doesn't mean people will use it. To help determine double attachment, NVIDIA looked at a couple different metrics relating to CPU and GPU sales.

With total GPU shipments at 336 Million units and total CPU shipments hitting only 273 Million, double attachment can help explain why so many more GPUs were sold than CPUs: if CPU sales more closely represents the number of systems sold or built last year, there are a large number of computers with unused integrated graphics in them which count as two shipped GPUs. This overlap would mean that Intel's shipped graphics number greatly over inflate the market impact of their graphics products.

Of course, we can't ignore the fact that the average PC enthusiast will likely upgrade their graphics card before their CPU and that multi-GPU solutions do account for at least a few of those shipments. We can't discount all of these shipments as double attachment, but it seems at least plausible that NVIDIA's real market share is somewhere between 65% and 75% based on the numbers they showed us. This is definitely more impressive than what we see on the surface.