Heady Sales for Graphics Chip Vendors

Graphics may be splashy on the screen but most users don’t give a lot of thought to the hardware that drives the pretty colors that show in pictures, animations and video.

But as HardwareCentral reports, graphic processing units (GPU)s are a key component of desktop and mobile PCs and the demand for ever-better graphics is rising. As IT departments seem poised for a major hardware refresh, where do graphics fit into the mix and which vendors are poised for success?

Despite being at each other

’

s throats for the entire year amid recession that clobbered the overall tech market, graphics processing unit (GPU) vendors did well in 2009 and continue to do well in 2010, according to new figures from Jon Peddie Research.

For 2009, JPR puts GPU chip sales, both for discrete and integrated graphics, at 414.2 million units, an 11 percent increase over the 373 million sold in 2008. For the first quarter of 2010, unit sales rose 44.3 percent over the same period last year. IDC has just issued its report on first quarter sales for CPUs, which rose 39 percent year-over-year.

Neither figure is anything to complain about, but they don’t tell the whole story. The first quarter of 2010 is being compared to Q1 of 2009, when the industry was in the depths of recession and sales plunged for everyone. As a result, as quarterly earnings have come out this month from chip and system vendors like Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), AMD (NYSE: AMD) and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), the industry is showing incredible year-over-year growth rates.

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PC Graphics Vendors: What Recession?