A report from Mercury Research has found that AMD has reached its highest overall x86 chip market share since 2013, again highlighting how far the company has come.
In case you’re not already in the know, Mercury Research is a market analyst firm that specialises in PC components and chips so it’s a fairly reliable source. Its research found that AMD has reached 18.3 percent of the overall x86 share with 19.7 percent of the client market. That works out as the company’s highest share since Q4 2013 and the first quarter of 2012 respectively. In further good news for the firm, AMD has also broken its all-time record for notebook market share penetration.
Looking over the figures, it’s been a steady but strong rise for AMD. Almost every quarter, it’s seen some kind of improvement with the improvement between Q1 2020 and Q2 2020 working out at 0.6 percent. In all, this quarter marks AMD’s tenth consecutive quarter of growth in the desktop PC market with seemingly no sign of that changing any time soon. In contrast, Intel’s recent earning reports highlighted issues with desktop platform volumes dropping by 14 percent.
Due to differences in how numbers are collected, it’s hard to tell if AMD’s success has led to issues for Intel. That’s because AMD puts its consumer processors and GPUs into the same revenue segment so it’s tricky to divide up specifically. However, it still seems highly likely that AMD is having some kind of impact on Intel.
That continues across the board with AMD taking some valuable gains in notebook sales with 19.9 percent market share being its highest percentage in its history. No doubt that the pandemic and rise in laptop sales helped here but now that AMD has a foothold, it’s sure to want to build on that. That may be why it’s quietly released two new mobile processors – the AMD 3015e and AMD 3020e – 6W dual-core Zen chips with Vega 3 graphics. They’re budget range laptop processors with a base clock of a mere 1,200MHz (although the 3020e gets a turbo frequency bump to 2,600MHz) but there’s certainly a market for cheap laptops and this should help AMD combat Intel.
Competition aside, and this is the kind of news that AMD will be delighted by. It comes off the back of a great set of financial results recently and the surprise news that Intel has delayed 7nm. AMD is clearly continuing a strong upwards trend.