The pandemic was a massive boon to the PC market, even though the semiconductor shortages limited the maximum potential growth of the industry. Among the biggest winners, we have NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Apple, as well as memory and NAND manufacturers Micron, HK Hynix, and Samsung. In the fabless segment, a few of these names are eliminated, leaving the IC Design companies to compete for the foundry share, either at TSMC or Samsung. Trendforce has released the list of the Top 10 IC Design Companies by Revenue in Q3 2021:
The list is similar to previous quarters’, with Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Novatek recording higher than expected growth. Meanwhile, chipmakers in the PC space also did extremely well, with NVIDIA becoming the second largest fabless IC design company. Team Green recorded a yearly growth of 55%, making it one of the most successful semiconductor companies in 2021. Driven by record sales of GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs (despite shortages), strong growth in the data center market (A100 accelerators dominated the SC rankings), and other semi-custom projects (such as the Nintendo Switch), NVIDIA plastered its place as the de-facto GPU designer in the industry.
AMD came in at #5 with a revenue of $4.3 billion, reflecting a yearly growth of 54%. Although this is a smidge lower than the results from the previous two quarters, it’s an impressive figure, nonetheless. The sales of the semi-custom console designs, paired with the incredible demand for the Ryzen parts, and Epyc server CPUs pushed the Lisa Su-led company to new heights.
