AMD’s share in the desktop CPU market continued to increase during the third quarter, a market researcher reported, while Intel’s decision to pull back in the low end of the mobile market left the two players relatively stable.
A report by Mercury Research said that third-quarter shipments in the x86 market were well below seasonal growth, though that was due to lower Internet of Things and SoC shipments, which had climbed significantly in the second quarter. Mercury reserved the specific numbers for its own clients.
Factoring out the IoT and SoC impact, however, AMD’s market share of the x86 market compared to Intel grew slightly, up 1.6 percentage points to 25.6 percent of the market. Intel retained the remaining 74.4 percent. Arm’s total share (including servers) versus all x86 shipments is estimated at 11.6 percent, up from 10.9 percent in the second quarter, analyst Dean McCarron wrote.
“ARM activity was modestly higher in client, mostly due to Apple’s growth in the third quarter and what we think was a slight increase in ARM based Chromebook units,” McCarron said.
AMD’s share in the desktop PC market has continued to soar, helped by its Ryzen X3D product lineup, which has outperformed Intel’s own chips. That trend continued, as the company gained 4.9 percentage points versus the same period of last year, and now controls a third of the desktop market (33.6 percent), Mercury found.
During Intel’s third-quarter earnings report, the company told Wall Street that it was lowering its emphasis on delivering “small core” or low-end products for the PC and focusing more on silicon for servers. That had an impact on Intel’s mobile share.
“Intel did manage to increase shipments, but well below seasonal levels and nowhere near the pace that AMD had, so Intel lost share to AMD in mobile processors,” Mercury’s McCarron wrote.
That still leaves AMD with about 20 percent of the market, the traditional ratio between the two companies. The company holds 21.9 percent of the market, slipping 0.4 percentage points from last year. Intel commands 78.1 percent of the mobile PC market, Mercury found.
