Market research firm In-Stat predicts that total revenue of chipset designers will exceed $10 billion in about four years time. The company thinks that the demand for personal computers will be growing and additional functionality required from core-logic sets will drive demand for innovative chipsets.

“In just the next few years, new chipsets will be required to support multicore processors, new front-side bus (FSB) architectures, new peripheral interfaces, and a growing list of features, such as virtualization and security. The chipset is a critical component in the PC design and chipset designs are changing rapidly to support these new features driven by changing PC usage models,” explains Chris Kissel, In-Stat analyst.

In-Stat is forecasting strong growth in the PC core-logic chipset market from $6.9 billion in 2005 to $10.3 billion in 2009. During this period, continued growth in PCs demand combined with new standards will create a very dynamic market for new chipset designs, the high-tech market research firm says. The challenge for PC chipset vendors is to meet the growing performance requirements and integrate as many features as economically possible.

A recent report by In-Stat found the following:

• The chipset ecosystem supporting AMD processors is growing, while the chipset ecosystem supporting Intel processors is shrinking due to Intel’s drive to “platformization”.
• Although less than 20% of x86 processors have an integrated memory controller today, In-Stat forecasts that roughly 70% will have integrated memory controllers in 2009, a trend similar to the embedded processing.
• PCs will shift from traditional AGP and PCI interfaces to PCI-Express, accounting for over 84% of all graphics interfaces and 98% of all peripheral interfaces in 2009.
• As processors increase in the number of cores and the amount of memory, core-logic chipsets will continue to integrate more external logic for I/O and other features.

The report “The Trendy Chipset for the x86 Processor” analyzes the processors by vendor, the chipsets by vendor, the changing standards, and the changing market dynamics influencing chipset and PC designs. Included in the report are forecast for the overall PC chipset market and various aspects of the market through 2009.