Demand is sky high for GPUs, according to industry intelligence firm Jon Peddie Research. In the company’s latest Market Watch report for calendar Q3 of 2020, it found that GPU shipments increased 10.8% year-over-year. AMD, Nvidia, and Intel all saw quarter-over-quarter increases as well.
As Jon Peddie notes in the breakdown of the report, GPU shipments are a leading indicator. Manufacturers purchase them before shipping PCs to consumers. This means that the market expects demand for PCs to remain high through the foreseeable future. The overall PC market increased 9.47% year-over-year, according to Jon Peddie.
Discrete GPUs from AMD and Nvidia were up 13.44% quarter-over-quarter. That jump is partially due to historical trends that lead to consumers purchasing more discrete GPUs in Q3 than Q2. But it also reflects the launch of Nvidia’s RTX 3000-series video cards in September. Those products flew off shelves and are still difficult to find.
And while bots and cryptominers are easy targets for frustrated consumers who cannot find a new GPU, Jon Peddie thinks it has more to do with people creating demand naturally.
“Factors influencing the robust sales of [discrete GPUs] in the past two quarters have clearly been increasing growth in gaming, and the need to outfit home offices due to COVID,” said Peddie. “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.”
And while those fools likely do exist, the issue is just general supply and demand.
