Latest figures show AMD chipping away at Intel's CPU dominance

Intel continues to rule the roost in the PC chip market, but AMD is gaining ground in server, desktop, and mobile, according to the latest figures from Mercury Research.

Mercury Research, which monitors the PC-related semiconductor and components markets, said that x86 processor shipments were broadly in line with expected seasonal trends for both client and server segments.

In fact, Q1 of this year was the first quarter since the COVID pandemic started that market results have been pretty much normal across desktop, mobile, and server, the company noted.

Discounting semi-custom embedded and IoT components, the headline numbers are that Intel accounted for 79.2 percent of the x86 CPU market during Q1, down from the 82.8 percent it enjoyed a year ago. AMD's market share jumped to 20.8 percent of all x86 chips shipped versus 17.2 percent a year ago.

The market dynamics shift slightly when including IoT and system-on-chip (SoC) figures as AMD was hit by dramatically lower SoC shipments caused by decreased gaming console demand, according to Mercury. While its share of the overall market was 26.1 percent during Q1, that was actually down from 34.6 percent a year ago.

For servers, the CPU market experienced typical seasonal downturn. The last quarter of 2023 was the sole quarter of growth in server chips for that year, Mercury says, but seasonal dynamics pulled shipments lower for the first quarter of this year.

Cutting to the chase, AMD saw its server chip share rise to 23.6 percent, up from just 18 percent a year ago, and Mercury says it is apparent that Genoa, AMD's 4th Gen Epyc processor family, is the main driver of growth here.

The client CPU segment was a microcosm of the overall market, with Intel taking 79.4 percent share during Q1 and AMD 20.6 percent, with AMD up about 3.5 percentage points on last year.

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Drilling down into mobile CPUs, Mercury says that Intel gained share for the first quarter, as it continued to ramp up shipments of Raptor Lake cores. The release of the newer Meteor Lake chips was slower than expected, with the chipmaker blaming packaging capacity. AMD's mobile shipments declined, particularly for its oldest mobile CPU cores. However, AMD's 19.3 percent market share was still up 3.1 percentage on the situation a year ago.

For desktop CPUs, the data shows AMD saw "nearly flat" shipments from a quarter ago, which it says is far better than typical seasonal trends, while Intel witnessed a slightly lower than normal post-Christmas seasonal decline.

The overall picture is that AMD has again gained on Intel, with its 23.9 percent desktop share up 4.7 percentage points on a year ago. This was due to surprisingly strong Vermeer core shipments, according to Mercury, and the latest desktop version of the Phoenix Point APU ramping up.

Intel's Raptor Lake 14xxx series CPUs also ramped strongly during the quarter, but these were replacing the older 13xxx series, so there was no net upside.

While these figures are only for x86 chips, Mercury estimates that Arm systems accounted for 11.1 percent of client systems during the quarter, up from a revised fourth quarter estimate of 10.3 percent. This includes Chromebooks and Apple's M-series Macs. ®