AMD Picks Intel's Pocket With PC, Laptop And Server X86 CPU Market Share Wins
AMD continues to chip away at Intel's dominant lead in x86 CPU market share with a round of gains across the board, including desktop PCs, laptops, and servers, according to the latest audit performed by Mercury Research and shared by AMD. The updated figures cap off an impressive year for AMD, which looks to end 2023 just at it had started—by stealing more of Intel's lunch money.
The most recent report splits the market share results into two categories: revenue share and unit share. Starting with the latter, AMD enters the holiday season with year-over-year gains of 5.8% in servers, 5.3% in desktop PCs, and 3.8% in laptops (mobile). Likewise, it's total client unit share movement (or market penetration movement) jumped 4.4% compared to the same quarter a year ago.
A chunk of those unit share gains took place over the previous quarter, save for desktop PCs, in which AMD conceded 0.2%. Otherwise, AMD notched sequential gains of 4.7% in serves, 2.9% in mobile, and 2.1% in all client unit share.
This is attributable to a "strong ramp of 4th Gen EPYC and Ryzen 7000 series processors." It's also a little surprising, given that AMD's Ryzen 7000 series CPUs (Zen 4) require a total platform upgrade with a shift to Socket AM5 and DDR5 memory. In contrast, Intel's 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs can leverage the same LGA 1700 socket as its 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs, with both DDR4 and DDR5 being supported.
The report doesn't go into fine grain detail about which specific CPUs are driving AMD's gains. That would be interesting to see, given the value proposition of AMD's previous generation Ryzen 5000 series (Zen 3), as well as its expanded lineup of chips boasting 3D V-Cache, which are popular among gamers.
As you might expect, AMD's gains translated to gains in revenue share. Looking at those figures, AMD notched year-over-year gains of 1.7% in servers, 4.1% in desktops, 5.1% in laptops, and 4.8% in total client revenue share. AMD also saw impressive quarterly gains of 4.4% (servers), 0.5% (desktops), 4.1% (laptops), and 2.8% (total client).
This will be something to keep an eye on going forward. While AMD is gaining ground according to Mercury Resarch, Intel is not standing pat. It's on a mission to regain process leadership by delivering five nodes in four years, it's spending heavy on chip fab expansions, and is about to launch its Meteor Lake CPUs for laptops and socketed systems, followed by Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and Panther Lake.
Meanwhile, there's been a ton of speculation and hype over AMD's upcoming Zen 5 processors. The scuttlebutt is that Zen 5 could be the biggest update to Zen since the first-gen stack arrived, with an architectural overhaul delivering huge IPC gains. Suffice to say, 2024 is going to be a fun year.
