According to the latest report from Jon Peddie Research (JPR) overall GPU shipments have been on the rise regarding the second quarter 2017 on a world-wide basis. According to the report the different vendors were able to increase shipments by 8% in the case of AMD, 10% regarding NVIDIA and Intel’s numbers went up by 6%.


Usually the Q2 numbers suffer from a slight decline in demand. Therefore seeing the numbers jump up, especially by as much as 7.2% sequentially (compared to the Q1 results) comes as a surprise. Since 2007 the total market volume has been declining and this is the first time that we see the opposite happen.

Looking for reasons as to why the market for discrete GPUs is growing these days we find them with the ongoing mining hype. Already back in 2013 when the pair Bitcoin and Litecoin has put the market upside down there was a spike in sales number of discrete graphics cards. Since in the case of Litecoin it didn’t take long until ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) miners were developed the demand returned back to normal after a few months.

In the case of Ethereum the story appears to be different. The hashing algorithm for Ethereum requires as much memory as possible, which in theory makes the development of specific ASICs impossible and therefore GPUs should remain the best tool for Ethereum mining. Nevertheless, as the market becomes saturated the ROI mining Ethereum will decrease to the point where it’s not beneficial for small miners anymore. At that point in time all the cards that have currently been sold to miners will end up on eBay and other auction platforms, which in turn will (finally) put pressure on the price of graphics cards mainly gamers used to buy.



Source: Jon Peddie Research