Processors Toolkit

AMD gains on Intel as market perks up

John G. Spooner and Michael Kanellos CNET News

Published: 04 Aug 2003 10:00 BST

Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices gained a pinch of market share year-on-year against rival Intel in a market that seems to be improving.

California-based AMD saw its market share in the second quarter of 2003 inch up to 15.7 percent, a tenth-of-a-point increase from its market share of 15.6 percent in the same period a year ago, according to statistics compiled by Mercury Research.

Intel, meanwhile, saw its market share slip to 82.5 percent in the second quarter, from 82.8 percent in the same period the year before. Other manufacturers, a grouping that includes Transmeta, increased their collective market share from 1.7 percent to 1.8 percent.

The big news for the quarter, however, is that the processor market appears to be on the rebound.

Microprocessor shipments were actually slightly below the norm in the second quarter. (PC shipments rose in the quarter, but sometimes the two markets aren't synchronised because of inventory overhand and shipment schedules). But a record number of portable components was shipped. Notebook chips sell for more than their desktop counterparts and are generally more profitable. Overall shipments are also rising.

"There's a lot of evidence that the third and fourth quarters are both going to be growth quarters as they normally are, seasonally, and pretty good growth quarters at that," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury. "The other thing that was very apparent was that the second was a record quarter for portable component shipments.

"Mobile was the bright spot in a not-so-bright quarter," McCarron added. "It's not necessarily a slam dunk, but someone who's looking for a system for basic utility -- a lot of them are choosing the notebook versus a desktop."

Although AMD made slight gains in the quarter, they don't provide much in the way of laurels to rest on. For one thing, the second quarter of 2002 was a terrible time for AMD. The company was in the midst of a price war with Intel and trying to burn off excess inventory. Intel gained six points of market share over the same period in 2001. As a result, AMD had an easy benchmark to beat this quarter.

AMD also didn't fare well sequentially. The company's market share fell nine-tenths of a percentage point from the first quarter, dropping from 16.6 percent to 15.7 percent. By contrast, Intel saw its market share increase from 81.7 percent in the first quarter to 82.5 percent.

"If you look at what has happened with AMD over the last couple of quarters, it was clear in Q1 that it did good business in China and that that business probably wasn't sustainable. They may have lost a little bit of that," McCarron said. "But typically you have a seasonal decline in Q2 and neither vendor really departed that decline."

The competition between the two companies will shift into high gear during the remainder of the year. On 23 September, AMD will release the Athlon64, a new desktop chip that can run 32-bit and 64-bit software.

Intel will then follow with Prescott, the successor to the Pentium 4. The chip will feature new instructions for better multimedia processing and a large cache for additional performance.

Mercury's numbers include so-called x86 processors shipped for inclusion in desktops, notebooks, servers and Xboxes. Microsoft incorporates Intel processors into its Xbox gaming console.