AMD has shipped over half a billion GPUs

Recent research from Jon Peddie has found that AMD has shipped over half a billion GPUs in just 7 years, with the firm generally seeing strong success when it comes to its GPU market share.

The PC Gaming Hardware Market Report demonstrated that AMD's discrete GPUs make up the bulk of its GPU sales at about 36 percent of its shipments with APUs accounting for 35 percent and consoles being responsible for the remaining 29 percent of shipments. Notebook APUs outnumber desktop APUs by 2 to 1. 

Break it down a little further and the biggest contributor is the Radeon NB APU at 23 percent followed by the Sony PlayStation at 20 percent then the Radeon DT dGPU and Radeon NB dGPU both at 18 percent and the Radeon DT APU at 12 percent. The Microsoft Xbox One series is way back at 9 percent. 

Compared to the competition, AMD has 22 percent of the overall GPU shipment market over the past seven years with Nvidia creeping in at 16 percent and Intel dominating with 62 percent. That's mostly down to the fact that nearly all Intel CPUs include an integrated GPU which ensures their much heftier market share is fairly untouched, despite the fact comparing integrated to discrete seems a little like dealing with apples and oranges. 

At the same time, Jon Peddie Research also looked at how things have changed for GPU shipments in the first quarter of 2020. Given the "unusual" year so far, it's a little all over the place. Overall GPU shipments decreased roughly 5.3 percent from the last quarter while AMD shipments in particular decreased 16.6 percent, Nvidia's share decreased 13.6 percent and Intel's actually increased 0.5 percent. 

Attach rates for discrete GPUs in PCs was 36 percent for the quarter which worked out as an increase of 4.15 percent over the last quarter. The research doesn't go into details as to why that might be the case but we're wondering if it's that when people were forced to embrace the working from home ethos, they considered this was a good time to ensure their system was up to scratch for a while, dodging the weakness of integrated GPUs. 

As an aside, there was also a decrease in tablet shipments, presumably due to people needing more oomph while stuck at home. 

Back to AMD's half a billion shipments and we're guessing that number is only going to grow faster. Next year, AMD can add Samsung smartphones to its list of platforms which is sure to help significantly, alongside everything else.