After the financial results of AMD and Intel, about which one could mischievously say that one company had a record success, while the other a record loss), the market share statistics of x86 processor manufacturers, which we regularly monitor, were also released. And this time will be especially interesting. Although the new processors with the Zen 5 architecture have been met with cold reactions, it seems that AMD has stepped up a lot against Intel with them. The trouble with Raptor Lake will probably get a lot of revenge for that.
By “upheaval” we mean that AMD’s market share rose, by quite a bit in one quarter. The company states that in the overall statistics of CPUs (both server and PC), from the 21.3% it had in the second quarter, it now reached a market share of 24.0% during the third quarter (July to September). The source of this data is a report by the analytical firm Mercury Research.
Raptor Lake rolling in Zen 5 desktop?
The biggest source of this movement was desktop processors, where the increase in market share was unusually fast (by the standards of what is usually seen in this statistic). AMD hovered around 20% or just above it for a long time, but in the third quarter it jumped to 28,7 % desktop market (so Intel should have 71,3 %), versus just 23.0% (77.0% for Intel) in the second quarter. This is an absolute record since the release of Ryzen processors and for the entire time that AMD has been publishing this statistic processed by the analytical firm Mercury Research.
A year ago (in Q3 2023), the company had only 19.2% in desktop and Intel 80.8%. Although Intel is not in immediate danger of falling below 50%, it is probably the biggest loss it has suffered in one quarter.
At the same time, AMD was gaining in revenue share. In the second quarter, the company had a much lower share of sales (18.8%) than CPU units sold (23.0%), which meant that Intel sold its processors at higher prices on average (it had the upper hand in the sense that that it attracted more wealthy customers in higher, more lucrative price ranges). In the third quarter, that almost reversed, and AMD now has a 27.3% share of desktop CPU sales (compared to a 28.7% unit share).
So it looks like AMD managed to improve its position quite a bit with the release of Ryzen 9000 desktop processors (although they didn’t go on sale until August). For Intel, at the same time, the trouble with the failing Raptor Lake processors culminated, the company was forced to admit that errors in voltage management were gradually irreversibly damaging their chips. The problem has been going on for years and there may be millions of affected chips. Their failure has already led to a significant number of complaints, which will probably continue for a while.
It’s likely that this is behind AMD’s success – the big “OEM” computer manufacturers, who have long automatically preferred Intel processors, are probably only now becoming more oriented towards AMD processors. This could theoretically still give AMD further share growth in the coming quarters and years, but of course it’s not certain – Intel can respond with discounts and other incentives to maintain its position.
Laptops are still tightly controlled by Intel
However, desktop computers are only a minor part of the market (Intel’s PC processor division had 29.7% of its revenue from desktop CPUs in Q3 2024, 70.3% was from laptops). In notebooks, Intel doesn’t have a problem with outgoing chips, but it still lost a little. AMD rose to 22,3 % (versus 20.3% in the previous quarter). But this is not a breakthrough, AMD has already had similar figures in recent years (Q3 2021, Q1 2022). A year ago, however, AMD only had 19.5%.
So Intel should have 77,7 %if we assume that Chinese Zhaoxin (formerly Taiwanese VIA) processors practically do not appear in notebooks. They are sold only on the domestic Chinese market and even there they don’t seem to be used much, so their share is probably still somewhere close to zero.
There is still quite a difference in the share of sales in the mobile market, AMD has only 19.2% (ie 80.8% for Intel) and is still pulling the tightrope in notebooks, despite the release of Ryzen AI 300 with Zen 5 architecture.
The total share of Ryzen processors (that is, client CPUs for PCs and laptops, but excluding server CPUs) is 23.9%, compared to 21.1% in the previous quarter and 19.4% a year ago.
Immobility in servers
On the contrary, shares in servers practically did not move at all. AMD has 24,2 % against 75,8 % Intel. However, he keeps his shares at the price of big discounts, which largely eliminated his earlier fat margins. AMD therefore has more than a third share of sales (33.9% against Intel’s 66.1%). Both of these shares are an improvement of just a tenth of a percentage point for AMD – it had 24.1% of units sold and 33.8% of revenue in the second quarter.
A certain increase can be seen year-on-year (in Q3 2023 the shares were 23.3 and 31.2%). It is possible that the small change between Q2 and Q3 was due to the fact that both companies released new processors for servers only at the end of September and October, respectively.
The statistics for the fourth quarter will be released in three months, perhaps we will see bigger movements, already influenced by the new generations (although both companies probably started delivering them to customers in advance and they already have some influence on the results in Q3). It is a question whether AMD will gain or lose with the Epycy 9005, because the newly released Xeons 6900P have greatly increased the competitiveness of Intel, which is perhaps in the best position with them since the ground-breaking Epycy 7002 “Rome” with the Zen 2 architecture. Since their release in In 2019, AMD is in a clear lead, which continues now, but Intel is still closer and theoretically could now regain some share (we’ll see).
Intel may be in trouble, but it still controls most of the market
However, these numbers are also a good reminder of one thing. Although it may seem that Intel is going from one trouble to another, and AMD is beating it everywhere, but this does not mean that it has reached the position of the weaker one (so the fans of the “underdogs”, as they say in English, should start keeping their fingers crossed for it) .
Despite all this, the company still holds over 70% of the x86 processor market, which shows what a disparity there still is between the quality of products and how many companies sell – Intel simply takes the bulk of the market anyway, and AMD competes against it with a handicap. Intel still has almost twice the revenue of AMD, and this is largely just from processors, while AMD owes a significant part of its revenue to GPU sales competing with Nvidia (against which the disparity is even greater).
Source: AMD
Source: www.cnews.cz
