AMD Grabs A Quarter Of X86 Market With Desktop Gains, But Server Growth Slows

AMD now accounts for 25 percent of all x86 processor shipments, but only made a slight increase in the past quarter against industry leader Intel in servers – the main gains came from the desktop market.

Processor shipments in Q3 were up only modestly on a sequential basis, with growth well below what is expected for the seasonal norm, according to independent PC component sales number cruncher Mercury Research.

The analyst attributed this to much lower desktop CPU shipments from Intel compared to Q2, blamed on PC makers drawing down inventory and slowing CPU purchases.

In contrast, AMD was unaffected by any inventory adjustments and saw seasonal desktop CPU growth, plus increases in mobile CPU shipments above what was expected during the quarter, Mercury observed.

The all-inclusive market data shows that AMD gained 0.5 percent sequentially to take it up to a quarter of all x86 chips – including not just server and desktop CPUs, but IoT chips and semi-custom products used in kit like game consoles.

This is actually a year-on-year decline for the Intel rival. It's down from the 30.7 percent it stood at in Q3 2023, hit by weaker demand for its system-on-chip (SoC) silicon for several quarters – a trend that appears to be slowing.

Of course, the other side of this coin is that Intel still accounted for 75 percent of the x86 market during Q3, despite all its woes. AMD continues to inch up against it across all segments in which they compete.

This includes desktop chips, where the challenger has gained almost ten percentage points compared to a year ago – from 19.2 percent in Q3 2023 to 28.7 percent in Q3 this year, half of which came during the last quarter.

However, Mercury cautioned this situation can be deceptive. Intel's apparent decline is partly due to inventory of its chips being used up by OEMs, so that if you looked at the figures for actual CPUs sold, Intel's share would likely be higher.

Mobile CPU share movements also favored AMD, but were less marked than in desktop because of a smaller impact from inventory adjustments on Intel's figures in the mobile segment. Here, AMD was still up by 2.8 percent compared with the same period a year ago, taking its share of mobile to 22.3 percent.

• The Register takes AMD's Ryzen 9800X3D for a spin
• Fujitsu, AMD lay groundwork to pair Monaka CPUs with Instinct GPUs
• AMD teases its GPU biz 'approaching the scale' of CPU operations
• A closer look at Intel and AMD's different approaches to gluing together CPUs

The server market was where AMD was expected by many to make gains against Intel. But Mercury's figures show the challenger increasing its market share by just 0.9 percent year-on-year, and just 0.1 percent over the previous quarter to 24.2 percent.

Both AMD and Intel experienced significant growth in server CPU shipments, with Intel seeing gains in both datacenter (DCAI) and networking/communications (NEX) segments, according to Mercury. The analyst only shares the actual figures with its paying subscribers.

"Due to very similar growth rates, AMD saw only a near-negligible increase in total share, and we note that Intel's Xeon SP shipment growth slightly outpaced AMD's Epyc as Intel's NEX shipments recovered," said research president Dean McCarron.

Turning to Arm PC CPU shipments, Mercury believes the share of client systems represented by this architecture increased to 10.3 percent in Q3, up from 10 percent in Q2.

However, it cautions that estimates for this sector are "rougher and significantly less accurate than typical" due to some "unusual shifts in the overall PC market."

If shipments have increased, this would be accounted for primarily by higher Apple Mac shipments – with small growth contributions from Chromebooks and Arm chips going into Copilot-enabled PCs.

"It's best to describe Arm share as approximately flat sequentially," McCarron said. ®