Industry analyst firm JPR recently released a report estimating that total worldwide hardware sales eclipsed the $30 billion mark. In terms of geography Asia lead the way with an estimated growth rate of 7% which will continue right through 2019, commanding $11.3 billion USD of the total existing market share. For those of us who are interested in the health of the PC hardware industry JPR’s publically available figures are full of interesting statistics.
2016 saw a number of new pieces of hardware released that made waves in enthusiast news circles. Arguably one of the biggest stories of the year came towards the mid-point with the launch of new Graphics Cards from both Nvidia and AMD. Team Green proved that the Geforce brand is still the place for hardcore enthusiasts looking for the bleeding edge performance with the expensive Geforce 1070 and Geforce 1080 video cards. AMD shot back just a couple of weeks later with the Polaris powered Radeon 480 which brought the performance of Nvidia’s high end last generation 9 Series cards for under $200 USD. AMD and Nvidia might not be fighting tooth and nail for power or performance anymore but their offerings certainly cover a wide variety of products at different price points.
Graphics cards aren’t the only PC hardware segment that saw innovation last year and will continue to see new products. Intel released their new 7000 series processor line, it doesn’t follow the traditional tick-tock pattern that Intel has been known but it does provide additional video encoding performance. AMD is expected to release its Ryzen platform at the Games Developer Conference late next month, the manufacturer’s first large platform update since 2013 – featuring the brand new AM4 motherboard design and enhanced performance versus the previous generation.
John Peddle, president of JPR had this to say about the upcoming launch of the Ryzen platform:
“We are also very excited about the prospects for the AMD Ryzen CPU platform and think it will be adopted at all three hardware tiers. Of course Intel CPUs currently offer superior power and value for gamers of every budget level, and their integrated graphics now rival game consoles.”
Despite JPR’s report that the PC hardware industry has eclipsed such a large sales amount reports of PC sales have been declining for several consecutive quarters – according to the Inquirer total sales were down 3.7% leading up to the Christmas season. It is an important distinction to make that JPR’s report about the industry surpassing a huge sales amount includes high end accessories like Ultra HD Monitors, gaming headsets, gaming mice and Curved Displays.
How do you feel about the state of the PC hardware industry? Sound off in the comments and let us know.
