Date: 16/12/2011

Mobile market need 3.1 billion SoC semiconductor ICs by 2015, forecasts In-Stat

In-Stat has forecasted that the total available market for mobile SoC to reach over 3.1 billion devices in year 2015, up from 2 billion in 2010. Gadgets that use SoC semiconductor IC chips include low cost mobilephones, smartphones, notebook computers, netbooks, tablets, digital still cameras, mp3 players, personal navigation devices, e-readers, handheld gaming consoles, digital camcorders, and portable media players.

"The shift toward graphical user interfaces and media-rich content in entertainment and computing has pushed multimedia acceleration, including graphics, video, and audio, in electronic devices from a simple co-processing function to the forefront of semiconductor and system design," says Jim McGregor, Research Director. "This change has been driven by richer content, higher accessibility to content over the Internet, industry standards, new technologies, and increased communication bandwidth. These advancements, however, also come with the challenges of increased complexity, increased performance requirements, and constraints in power, size, and cost."

Key research findings shared by In-Stat include:
There are three driver/magnet platforms in the mobile segment - smartphones, tablets, and notebooks PCs - that will grow at a CAGR of 25.7% as compared to 8.7% for the overall mobile market
Only 40% of the mobile SoC TAM will use at least one dedicated GPUs in 2011. It is important to note that both the number of SoCs using GPUs is increasing and the number of GPU cores per SoC is increasing throughout the forecast period.
Intel and Imagination lead the GPU market because of their dominance in PCs and smartphones, respectively. Combined, the two are projected to comprise 61.3% of the GPU Technology Mobile Serviceable Available Market in 2011.
The division between PC and mobile CE GPUs will narrow in the future, increasing the competition between GPU technologies.