No PC chip growth in 2012, phones fair far better

You can measure how well a market is doing in a number of different ways. IDC takes the ‘macro’ view – researching hard to work out what the long term patterns look like. At the other end of the scale, IC Insights watch the the fabrication plants (FABs) and they know who has bought which chips. Cross-referencing these stories brings a new kind of accuracy. KitGuru holds one set of data in its left hand and another in its right – while wearing a ‘slightly pervy blind fold of justice'. Which one’s heavier?

While Qualcomm has managed a massive increase in semi-conductor sales, those chips are mostly helping to fuel the mobile market. Specifically, the arrival of multi-core Snapdragon designs are being, er, snapped up by phone manufacturers – eager for an alternative to the Samsung produced chips powering Apple’s rise. Ironically, some of Samsung's own anti-Apple designs also use Qualcomm. Nice.

Off the back of Qualcomm’s new launches, analysts are predicting that Qualcomm’s shares will bounce up by a least 10% in value. That will make them very attractive, given that banks themselves are in the ‘suffering huge loses business’ right now with the collapse of the Greek economy.

While Samsung’s dominance in the phone market is not as strong as Intel’s is in the PC business – the Korean giant still commands around 60% of the multi-core mobile market.

Which brings us back to the title of this article, which is based on the latest info from market gurus IC Insights.

If we add together the chip shipments for Intel, nVidia and AMD – comparing Q1 2011 to Q1 2012 – then we see an overall increase of just 0.18%

That's as close to zero as makes no difference.

KitGuru says: While the phone market is booming now and the PC chip business is flat – IDC is predicting a big jump next year. The entire industry is hoping that IDC is right about growth patterns for 2013/14. This industry needs some good news.

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