In the first quarter, AMD gained ground on Intel in the desktop and server segments sequentially and year over year. In the laptop segment, Intel managed to eke out a sequential share gain, but rival AMD still ended up with a bigger share of shipments than a year before.
While Intel made an incremental share gain against AMD in the x86 CPU market in the first quarter, the move did little to slow the upward trajectory AMD has been on over the past year.
CPU-tracking firm Mercury Research reported on Thursday that Intel’s x86 CPU market share grew 0.3 points sequentially to 75.6 percent against AMD’s 24.4 percent in the first quarter. However, AMD managed to increase its market share by 3.6 points year over year.
These figures only captured the server, laptop and desktop CPU segments. When including IoT and semicustom products, AMD grew its x86 market share sequentially by 1.5 points and year over year by 0.9 points to 27.1 percent against Intel’s 72.9 percent.
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In an email, Mercury Research President Dean McCarron said AMD’s “strong recovery” in semicustom chip shipments for game consoles allowed the company to grow all-inclusive share from last year’s fourth quarter to this year’s first quarter.
Within the traditional IT segments, AMD managed to gain ground on Intel in the desktop and server segments sequentially and year over year. But it was in the laptop segment where Intel eked out a sequential share gain, even though rival AMD ended up finishing the first quarter with a higher share of shipments than what it had a year ago.
In the server segment for x86 CPUs, AMD’s share grew 1.5 points sequentially and 3.6 points year over year to a record 27.2 percent against Intel’s 72.8 percent.
While both Intel and AMD saw “substantial” growth in server CPU shipments in the first quarter—contributing to a nearly 20 percent increase from the same period last year— “AMD’s growth rate in the quarter was multiples of Intel’s,” according to McCarron.
For the desktop segment, AMD’s share increased 0.9 points sequentially and 4.1 points year over year to 28 percent against Intel’s 72 percent.
McCarron said that AMD saw a “very large surge in demand” for some of its highest-end desktop CPUs, mainly the X3D versions of its Ryzen 9000 products that use the company’s 3-D V-cache technology to significantly increase the CPU’s cache.
“This resulted in an atypical first-quarter uptick in AMD’s share, and while we don’t normally discuss pricing in our share reporting, this high-end mix growth also resulted in record desktop and client ASPs [average selling prices] for AMD, and record desktop CPU revenues for the company,” he wrote.
The ASP increases were “so large that AMD’s revenues were up substantially and set new records, even though desktop unit shipments declined and are less than half of AMD’s peak for the segment,” McCarron added.
In the laptop segment, Intel’s share grew 1.2 points sequentially to 77.5 percent against AMD’s 22.5 percent in the first quarter. AMD, however, still managed to finish the quarter with higher market share that was 3.2 points than it was in the same period a year ago.
McCarron said AMD’s quarterly sequential share loss was likely the result of “consumer mix-related weakness” at the expense of Intel’s “business-related” growth. He noted, however, that both suppliers shipped fewer CPUs than they did in the previous quarter.
With respect to their AI PC efforts, McCarron said he noted an expansion in product availability for x86 processors powering such systems, primarily Intel’s Core Ultra 200V “Lunar Lake” chips and AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 “Strix Point” chips.
“These products seem to be poised for a meaningful increase in sales in the coming quarters,” he wrote.
While AMD mostly came out on top in the first quarter, McCarron said Arm’s estimated CPU share against x86 products crossed into the double digits for the first time, growing 2.3 points sequentially to 11.9 percent. This was mainly due to a “surge” of Nvidia’s Grace CPUs for servers and a large increase of Arm CPU shipments for Chromebooks.