A thousand questions in the general sense.
Text |leitechAfter several consecutive quarters of declining shipments, the PC market has finally ushered in a wave of recovery. According to data released by Canalys, in the fourth quarter of 2023, global PC shipments increased by 3% year-on-year, ending seven consecutive quarters of year-on-year decline.
According to the latest report released by market research agency Jon Peddie Research, global PC client CPU shipments in the fourth quarter of 2023 reached 67.25 million units, an increase of 9% quarter-on-quarter and 24% year-on-year, far exceeding market expectations.
***jon peddie research ）
A set of data in the report has piqued Xiaolei's interest: IGPU shipments increased by 8% month-on-month and 18% year-on-year to 60 million units, and the penetration rate will grow to 98% in the next five years. When Xiao Lei saw this set of data for the first time, he was a little hard to believe, after all, in the eyes of some PC players, the CPU with a core graphics card is not very meaningful, because the host will also be equipped with a discrete graphics card, and it is more economical to buy a CPU without a core graphics.
But if you think about it carefully, today's nuclear display is no longer as unbearable as it was back then, and after eating the process dividend, it is no longer a simple "bright card", but a role that can assume the role of a productivity tool.
However, as the core graphics become stronger and stronger, and the coverage rate is getting higher and higher, will the entire PC market, especially the discrete graphics card market, be affected?
In the PC world, the performance of the graphics card determines the graphics processing power of your computer, which is especially important in gaming games and image processing.
Graphics cards are mainly divided into nuclear graphics and independent graphics, the former is directly integrated on the CPU, the performance release is average, but it is better than "one money can do two things", the latter is independent of the CPU, the performance release efficiency is higher, enough to support all kinds of 3A masterpieces and professional editing, often when we discuss the graphics card, we refer to the independent display and not the nuclear display.
Why? The early cores are really a little off the table, and even in a strict sense, the core graphics card is not a graphics card, its video memory is the best memory of the computer, and the heat dissipation and power consumption are shared with the CPU, and the upper limit is extremely low. Even some of the older core graphics do not even have the ability of**4k native**, and there will be various stuttering situations during **live broadcast.
AMD Official).
It can be said that in addition to being able to act as a "bright card" in special circumstances, the early core display has almost no advantages in terms of **.
ASUS Official).
So, why can such an unbearable core display still occupy most of the entire computer market? There are three main reasons for this:
1. On the notebook market side, especially in the thin and light category, there will be no independent display, the main selling point of this type of product is battery life, light and thin, low calorific value and reasonable, and the core display just meets all the needs;
2. The demand for office PCs has not declined as rapidly as personal PCs, and even in the first two years, there has been a trend of rebound. The configuration of office computers is generally not in high demand, and it can handle some simple documents and **. The company's procurement will not pay too much attention to the needs of productivity, many small and medium-sized enterprises purchase office PCs are often "can be used", in the past two years, enterprises have also risen in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and many office PC configurations are actually very outdated. The core display PC can basically meet common office tasks, taking today's popular production task "making short**" as an example: a CPU with a core display can basically complete simple editing and production. Therefore, the office crowd has become the target user of the display;
3. Cost-effective, not all consumers are computer enthusiasts, the computer may be just an ordinary tool for querying information, work, and study, and there are not so many extreme needs. Generally speaking, laptops that only carry a core graphics card are generally close to the people and are more easily accepted by the market. According to the data released by JPR, nearly 70% of the world's computers do not have discrete graphics cards, in other words, the core graphics card is the real big market.
***jon peddie research）
What's more, the era of tasteless food and discarding pity has long passed.
AMD and Intel began to strengthen the core performance of their CPUs early on, Intel launched IRIS very early, and even equipped it with EDRAM cache with great luxury; AMD is even more simple and rude, directly using the self-developed Radeon Vega discrete graphics core, which also allows AMD to maintain the name of the strongest core graphics for a long time.
Under the mutual involvement of these two manufacturers, in 2024, we can see a lot of core graphics with performance comparable to some independent graphics cards.
ASUS Official).
Taking Intel's newly released Core Ultra 7 155H processor as an example, its Arc core graphics has 8 GPU cores and 128 Vector Engines (vector engine ray tracing unit, 8 hardware ray tracing unit), which greatly improves the geometric rendering capability. It also integrates all the core features of a high-performance GPU, including support for DX12U, **1 codec, DP4A AI acceleration engine, and Intel Xess. Intel officials also said that the game performance of the Ruixuan core display is 2 times higher than that of the previous Iris XE core display, which is a product that is enough for a bucket.
Intel official).
So, will the stronger and stronger core graphics hit the high-end graphics card market of NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel?Of course not.
Intel official).
Even if AMD and Intel are really capable of building a CPU with a strong core level, the market and consumers will not buy it. Because the strength of the core graphics means that the scale and power consumption will increase. Unlike the independent graphics card can be scheduled according to the current tasks of the computer, the core graphics need to work all the time, under the dual pressure of the core display and the CPU, the battery life of the laptop should be at least half folded. What's more, as mentioned earlier, the video memory of the core graphics is the best in memory, even if it is LPDDR5T with low power consumption and high frequency, it is difficult to meet the needs of high-performance core graphics in terms of bandwidth and speed.
Instead of putting up with this "four dislikes" product, why not honestly buy an all-round office notebook?
Lenovo Official).
The rapid progress of the core graphics card will indeed bring some pressure to the entry-level graphics card market, and AMD will be hit the hardest.
In 2023, it was revealed that AMD will gradually abandon the high-end graphics card product line and shift its focus to the low-end market, but the problem is that AMD has almost no achievements in this market, and it is unable to find the north by Nvidia on the mobile side, and can only rely on its own Ryzen processor to barely save a little share. If today's GPUs can reach about 60% of entry-level graphics cards in some basic entertainment and productivity attributes, in less than half of the cases, it will definitely have a devastating impact on entry-level graphics cards, and AMD is no exception. Therefore, how AMD chooses between the two depends on Su Ma's decision.
Back to our question: will the core graphics affect the layout of the entire graphics card market?Judging by the current development trends, the answer is yes.
Although the performance of the core graphics is relatively weak, with the continuous advancement of technology, the performance of the core graphics is also gradually improving. This allows some applications that originally required a discrete graphics card, such as light gaming, image processing, etc., to be completed with the support of the GPU. This will undoubtedly reduce the market demand for discrete graphics cards, which will affect the layout of the entire graphics card market.
As the gap between the performance of the core graphics card and the discrete graphics card is gradually narrowing, many manufacturers have begun to adjust their product positioning. On the one hand, high-end discrete graphics cards continue to pursue higher performance to meet the needs of professional users; On the other hand, mid-range and low-end discrete graphics cards have begun to develop in the direction of higher cost performance to cope with the impact of nuclear graphics and attract more consumers. This change in product positioning will undoubtedly have a certain impact on the graphics card market.
And the core graphics card, which was once looked down upon by us, may really become the "next form" of the discrete graphics card under the continuous iteration of technology.