Jon Peddie's latest graphics shipment numbers are in, and the results are well in line with the trends identified in our previous reporting on the Intel and AMD earnings calls. Specifically, the entire channel is preparing for a boost in sales soon, as seasonal back-to-school buying starts. Everyone is also hoping and praying for a round of IT upgrades that are now overdue. The thinking is that there is a ton of pent-up demand in the IT market as everyone is keeping costs down by not upgrading, so all of that demand will have to come rushing into the market the minute that IT managers get some money to spend again. In this respect, the channel is "pricing in" the expected IT upgrade spending, so let's hope that it isn't disappointed.

The actual numbers that JPR gives are worth looking at, because they show that Intel and AMD stole a percentage point of market share each from NVIDIA over this past quarter. Peddie's chart doesn't break the numbers out by segment (at least, the publicly available chart doesn't), but it's likely that AMD poached its point of NVIDIA marketshare in the discrete graphics space, where AMD's Radeon line currently provides an incredible amount of GPU bang per buck.

Intel got its point in the integrated graphics processor (IGP) segment, obviously, and consumers skip portables containing the premium NVIDIA IGP parts for the cheaper Intel-based options. It's also likely that netbooks are another factor, where, despite the enthusiasm behind NVIDIA's Ion platform, Intel has 100 percent of the IGP marketshare.

As Peddie points out, the fall will bring the releases of Windows 7 and the next version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard. Users who have been holding off on their OS upgrades may also have held off on their computer upgrades, so they could be planning to pick up a new machine when these new OSes come out.

This channel restocking has made for some seasonably strange behavior, as the second quarter, which is normally down, saw a 31 percent surge in total graphics chipset shipments. So this is a real inventory correction, but JPR is careful not to get prematurely excited that it's (yet) anything other than a bounce off the bottom.

"Things probably aren't going to get back to the normal seasonality till Q3 or Q4 this year," the note says, "and we won't hit the levels of 2008 until 2010." To this, we would add that if in 2010 we do actually rebound to graphics chipset shipment levels in line with the first half of 2008, this would be evidence of a major victory for the entire economy and we could all break out the champagne. Graphics chipsets (along with other components) are a leading indicator of the PC market, and IT spending in general is a coincident indicator with GDP, so a larger recovery would be well underway by the time graphics shipments rise that high.