Shipments of x86 processors during the last quarter of 2022 fell by 19% quarter-on-quarter and by 34% year-on-year. In both cases, these are the biggest drops in the history of Mercury Research measurements going back to the 1980s. According to this agency, 374 million x86 chips were sold during the whole of last year for about 65 billion dollars, sales fell by 20% year-on-year.
At least AMD can have a little joy. The company also did not avoid absolute declines, but Intel was worse off. Lisa Su’s team is thus cutting off market share from its rival. This has jumped from 12 to 31% over the past five years. This number symbolizes all shipped x86 chips for desktops, laptops, servers, consoles and IoT.
Mercury Research also analyzes shares in individual segments, but it’s not so rosy anymore. AMD persistently manages to grow only in the server area, where Intel has already cut 17.6% of the pie. But with desktops and laptops, it’s like on a swing. Compared to the third quarter, AMD improved, but already had higher shares.
AMD’s share of x86 chip shipments
| Desktopy | Notebooks | Servers | In total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 2019 | 17,1 % | 13,1 % | 2,9 % | 13,3 % |
| Q2 2019 | 17,1 % | 14,1 % | 3,4 % | 13,9 % |
| Q3 2019 | 18,0 % | 14,7 % | 4,3 % | 14,6 % |
| Q4 2019 | 18,3 % | 16,2 % | 4,5 % | 15,5 % |
| Q1 2020 | 18,6 % | 17,1 % | 5,1 % | 14,8 % |
| Q2 2020 | 19,2 % | 19,9 % | 5,8 % | 18,3 % |
| Q3 2020 | 20,1 % | 20,2 % | 6,6 % | 22,4 % |
| Q4 2020 | 19,3 % | 19,0 % | 7,1 % | 21,7 % |
| Q1 2021 | 19,3 % | 18,0 % | 8,9 % | 20,7 % |
| Q2 2021 | 17,1 % | 20,0 % | 9,5 % | 22,5 % |
| Q3 2021 | 17,0 % | 22,0 % | 10,2 % | 24,6 % |
| Q4 2021 | 16,2 % | 21,6 % | 10,7 % | 25,6 % |
| Q1 2022 | 18,3 % | 22,5 % | 11,6 % | 27,7 % |
| Q2 2022 | 20,6 % | 24,8 % | 13,9 % | 29,2 % |
| Q3 2022 | 13,9 % | 15,7 % | 17,5 % | 28,5 % |
| Q4 2022 | 18,6 % | 16,4 % | 17,6 % | 31,3 % |
Limited production capacities may play a role. Intel has its own factories only for CPUs and secondary chips, AMD has to rely on the production lines of TSMC or Global Foundries, where they have to leave room for GPUs or APUs for consoles. And where factories have to fulfill orders for other companies as well. Because of this, you will often come across many times more desktops and laptops with Intel in stores.
In general, x86 processors are threatened by the Arm platform. According to the last quarter, it already had 13.3% representation on desktops and laptops. This is mainly thanks to Apple, which has already gotten rid of x86 in almost all Macs. But Armu is also doing well on Chromebooks and is slowly growing on Windows PCs as well.
The most popular processors
Source: PCMag, Reuters, Wccftech
