The bad news for Intel just keeps on rollin’. This time it’s the latest figures from Mercury Research showing AMD pinching year-on-year market share from Intel in both desktop and laptop PCs. Oh, and servers, too. Ouch.
Mercury’s numbers do show an overall uptick for Intel in terms of total x86 chip market share. However, that’s a consequence of cratering sales of AMD’s SoCs, specifically the chips in gaming consoles. Mercury doesn’t break down the numbers, but Microsoft’s Xbox console sales have largely imploded of late. So, that will likely be where much of the pain is coming from.
The loss of console sales for AMD is largely inevitable given the cyclical nature of game consoles and the fact that we’re nearer the end of the current generation of consoles than the beginning.
More specifically, AMD’s desktop x86 CPU share for the second quarter of 2024 grew to 23%, up from 19.4% for the same quarter last year. Intel and AMD are the only players in the x86 CPU market, so AMD’s gain is Intel’s loss, with the latter slipping from 80.6% to 77%.
In laptops, AMD is up to 20.3% for the latest quarter, up from 16.5% for the same quarter last year. Finally, in servers, AMD improved from 18.6% to 24.1%, again from Q2 2023 to Q2 2024.
The picture in terms of comparing this latest quarter to Q1 2024 is a little more mixed, with AMD very slightly up in servers and laptops and marginally down in desktops. But the overall trendlines are clear enough.
Incidentally, if you’re wondering how Arm chips fit into all this, Mercury says that sales of PCs powered by Arm CPUs are actually falling. If that sounds odd given all the hullabaloo around Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X chips, apparently sales of Chromebooks are also falling and Q2 2024 is too early for volumes of those Snap’ X laptops to have begun scaling.
In other words, we’ll have to look to figures for the next few quarters to see how much traction Qualcomm is getting in the market thanks in part to being the first to offer a CPU compliant with Microsoft’s Copilot+ AI standard.
Anywho, if the overall picture doesn’t look great for Intel, it’s worth noting that it still holds an absolutely dominant position in desktops, laptops and servers, owning the heavy majority of market share in all three segments.
So, any suggestion of Intel’s imminent demise is surely an overstatement. It remains by far the biggest player in PC processors.