Intel Continues Gaining Ground For Linux Graphics

Following the success of Ivy Bridge and their continued open-source contributions, Intel graphics continue to gain market-share on the Linux desktop.

Last month I mentioned Intel Winning Over NVIDIA For Linux Enthusiasts. The trends cite the publicly-available OpenBenchmarking.org data, which largely reflects the latest happenings of Linux enthusiasts.

The auto-generated statistics for the month of July are now available and they continue to reflect Intel's growing market-share when it comes to Linux graphics use.

As reflected by the OpenBenchmarking.org GPU index, July 2012 set a new 12-month usage high for Intel integrated graphics. In july, 37% of the recorded data submitted by Phoronix Test Suite users were running Intel graphics. This is in comparison to ATI/AMD graphics at around 23% and NVIDIA graphics at a new low of 24%, while the remainder is spread between the different 3D virtualization guest drivers and the smaller hardware vendors.

Besides integrated Intel graphics being very common to retail PCs, Intel's been gaining much ground due to the success of their Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors that offer rather attractive graphics capabilities. For Linux users, Intel is the only vendor with fully open-source graphics support that is provided at launch -- Ivy Bridge open-source code has been available since last year, the 2013 Haswell and Valley View code is already in active public development, there is Ivy Bridge public documentation already, etc. For those who care about serious open-source GPU driver support, Intel is the big winner.

It will be interesting to see how these numbers pan out in the coming quarters as the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver finally begins to work for newer AMD Radeon hardware, unknown activities within the NVIDIA camp, and Intel's continued open-source initiatives while also having more exciting products coming down the pipe. Intel's Haswell graphics performance in H1'2013 should be even more compelling than Ivy Bridge thanks to the stacked memory and other architectural advancements while Valley View will bring open-source in-house (non-PowerVR) graphics to Intel hardware in the mobile space. Good times are ahead!

Find more hardware and software statistics at OpenBenchmarking.org. Plus new features and usability enhancements coming soon through the work on Randaberg and Unterschleissheim.