Health Growth Predicted For Chipset Market

The PC chipset market is expected to see strong growth through 2009, a market research firm said Monday.

The market is forecast to increase to $10.3 billion in 2009 from $6.9 billion this year, In-Stat said. The strong market is expected to be helped by continued growth in PC demand, combined with new standards.

The challenged for vendors, however, will be in meeting the growing performance requirements and integrate as many features as economically possible, In-Stat said.

"In just the next few years, new chipsets will be required to support multi-core processors, new front-side bus architectures, new peripheral interfaces, and a growing list of features, such as virtualization and security," In-Stat analyst Chris Kissel said in a statement.

In other findings, the chipset ecosystem supporting processors from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is expected to grow, while the chipset ecosystems supporting Intel Corp. processors is expected to shrink, due to Intel's drive to selling chip platforms.Also, the percentage of x86 processors with an integrated memory today is increase to 70 percent in 2009 from 20 percent today, In-Stat said.