The market for workstations remains a healthy one. Jon Peddie Research reports that the market held onto most of its previous and substantial gains, seeing its second-highest volume total in the third quarter of 2014. Worldwide, the industry shipped approximately 1.02 million workstations last quarter, posting a 4.7% gain over the same quarter a year ago, along with a modest 2.8% quarterly decline over Q2'14's all-time high, according to JPR.

Looking forward, JPR Senior Analyst, Alex Herrera, expects to see the market's momentum continue. "The third quarter marked the official launch of Intel's Haswell-E processor and supporting Grantley platform, an event that triggered refreshes of every major OEM's premium deskside workstation line. But shipments of those new models didn't ramp until Q4, meaning that any subsequent volume surge would be reflected not in last quarter's results, but next quarter's."

Mirroring the results of the workstation market it serves, the professional graphics market followed up Q2's record-high volume with a modest sequential decline, but it still managed to deliver the second-highest volume total on record. The industry, primarily composed of the Nvidia/AMD duopoly, shipped a total of approximately 1.28 million workstation-caliber GPUs in the third quarter, including both mobile modules and deskside add-in cards.