by Anton Shilov
12/30/2002 | 05:44 AM
Although personal computer market does not grow, it does not mean that personal computers are not in demand at all. Whatever IT managers claim, companies and end-users still need to replace their old PCs with new ones due to amortisation and warranty issues. Because of economical crisis, more cost-effective personal computers are now in fashion, hence, PC vendors try to design more and more cheap solutions that are still indisputably more powerful compared to average machines bought three or four years ago. The obvious decision to make a computer cheaper is to utilise a chipset with integrated graphics core. This year Intel has been promoting its Pentium 4 platform quite successfully and also introduced its i845G series of chipsets with integrated graphics core. The latter became popular from the very start and after Intel introduced its new Celeron processors based on the Northwood-128 core, the integrated core-logic products became more popular compared to the discrete chipsets.
According to Taiwanese MIC (Market Intelligence Center), integrated core-logic sets occupied 31% of the market in the first quarter, but skyrocketed to 39% and 48% in the second and the third quarters respectively after Intel announced its i845G series and rolled out its new Celeron CPUs. In the fourth quarter of 2002 the market share of integrated core-logic products achieved 52%, more than the share of discrete solutions. <%BANNER[article]%>
According to analysts, the share of mainboards with built-in graphics capabilities is going to rise in 2003 and 2004 even more. As a result, the makers and developers of graphics card should try to find different markets for their products, say set-top-boxes, consoles, multimedia devices in order to continue earning more money.