“We'll have to wait for BullDozer to see if that produces any real threat” “if it can find a CEO that doesn't scare away investors) is not necessarily undervalued, but, I believe that it's pipeline is more promising than it has been in a while.”
Why would the CEO whose tenure developed the promising pipeline scare investors?
That implies you think the cpu is important after all. It actually is a very complicated dynamic, trying to estimate what combination of cpu/gpu chip is the winning formula hindered by the fact that you can still mix and match separately if you wish on PC/notebook specifications. The fact that Intel still has over 50% marketshare in gpus implies that the cpu influence is still dominant although there is no doubt that buyers on a budget with a gaming bent will gravitate towards the better gpu spectrum on a fusion type chip which is what AMD is relying on to survive.
Numbers provider Jon Peddie Research has published its estimates for graphics chip shipments in Q4 and they are not pretty as due to a slower PC demand and the tablet expansion, PC and thus GPU sales were lower than expected.
Shipments of GPUs and GPU-equipped CPUs in Q4 were of 113 million units, which represents a drop of 7.8% compared to the same period of 2009. According to JPR, the PC graphics crown remained in Intel's possession but the company actually lost market share - going down from 55.2% in Q3 to 52.5% in Q4. Intel's loss was to both AMD and Nvidia's gain though as the former reached 24.2% (23% in Q3) and the latter topped 22.5% (21%). As for VIA and Matrox they both kept their market share intact from Q3 to Q4 and were at 0.8% and 0.1%, respectively.
Total graphics sales in 2010 were of 432.2 million, up from 414.2 million in 2009.