The bad news for Intel keeps coming as rival AMD is slowly chipping away at its dominance in server, desktop and mobile processors, although the industry giant still holds onto the lion's share of the market and any other outfit has a long way to go to unseat it.

Latest figures from PC component market watcher Mercury Research covering Q2 of 2024 show that Intel has slipped several percentage points in market share for each of the three main CPU categories - server, desktop and mobile - compared with the same period last year, while AMD has gained.

Chipzilla's rival made its biggest gains in server CPUs, where it increased market share 5.6 percent to 24.1 percent of shipments, a figure that is also an increase on the previous quarter.

However, in desktop CPUs, AMD's share of the market stood at 23 percent in Q2, up 3.6 percent on the same period a year ago, but actually down slightly by 0.9 percent from shipments in Q1.

In mobile, AMD's share of shipments was up 3.8 percent to 20.3 percent compared with a year ago, also up slightly on the figures for Q1.

But a look at the overall market paints a slightly different picture. Total processor shipments were down during Q2 compared with Q1, which is lower than normal seasonal trends, according to Mercury.

It attributes this decline to much lower shipments in the Internet of Things (IoT) and system-on-chip (Soc) segments - embedded CPU markets - due to weaker demand for these chips, especially for AMD's SoC processors used in games consoles. There were also lower shipments of entry-level mobile processors, primarily CPUs sold into Chromebooks.

When this is taken into account, Intel actually gained overall market share - up 7 percent compared with a year ago.

"The driver of the gains here was AMD's shrinking SoC business. While AMD gained total client and server share, the movement was far less than what was needed to overcome dramatically lower SoC shipments," said Mercury Research President Dean McCarron.

The picture for Intel could have been worse considering the run of bad fortune it has been having.

Recently, Chipzilla was forced to admit to problems with some of its 13th- and 14th-gen "Raptor Lake" processors that were causing stability issues and overheating, and is delivering a microcode patch to fix the chips that users should get in BIOS updates.

But as one Reg columnist detailed this week, Intel has other problems, not least of which are struggles with low yields on many of its new chip families.

Last week, the Santa Clara megacorp revealed $1.6 billion in losses during Q2 of this year, announced plans to layoff more than 16,000 staff - at least 15 percent of its workforce - and is cutting capital investment by more than 20 percent to between $25 billion and $27 billion.

Intel chief Pat Gelsinger, who rejoined the firm in 2021 to turn around its fortunes, blamed some second quarter woes on US export restrictions on sales to China, but it can't help that the chip giant lacks any credible GPU products at a time when datacenter spend has swung in favor of these chips thanks to the current AI craze.

This was noted by Mercury, which said that both AMD and Intel saw modest improvements in server CPU shipments during Q2, which is notable as "the market for conventional server CPUs has slowed greatly due to datacenter demand switching to AI-centric GPUs."

Intel's growth was primarily in network and edge CPUs rather than traditional datacenter CPUs, where Intel's reported revenues were fairly flat, said the analyst house.

Finally, on the subject of Arm CPUs, Mercury estimates that the share of the PC client market by this architecture is actually down slightly to 10 percent, from 11 percent in Q1.

This is despite the well-publicized launch of a raft of Windows "Copilot+ PCs" powered by Qualcomm Arm chips at Microsoft's Build conference back in May.

According to Mercury, the drop was due to a large decline in demand for Chromebook CPUs and lower shipments of Apple's Arm-based Mac computers.

This was partially offset by early shipments of Arm CPUs into Copilot-enabled PCs, but "volumes here are believed to be fairly small so early in the product ramp and weren't enough to make up for the declines in Chromebooks." ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/09/intel_amd_market_research/