Even though Advanced Micro Devices said back in the first quarter that it had realigned resources to better address its customers’ needs, this still has not saved the company from further microprocessor revenue share loss in Q1 2008.

“Short Term Winner” Makes Long Term Gains

In the first quarter, Intel accounted for 79.7% of global microprocessor market revenue, up 1.2% points from 78.5% in the fourth quarter. In contrast, AMD lost market share on a sequential basis in the first quarter, taking 13% of global revenue, down 1.1% points from 14.1% in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to iSuppli market tracking agency.

Despite of AMD’s loss, analysts from iSuppli believe that there is no danger for the company.

“Intel was the short-term winner in the first quarter microprocessor market. But over the previous 12-month period, the trend is reversed, with AMD growing its share. AMD’s PC microprocessor product portfolio has become much stronger during the last year, particularly on the desktop side. Customers clearly are responding to AMD’s moves,” said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst, compute platforms, for iSuppli.

AMD managed to increase its share by 2.2% compared to the first quarter of 2007. Intel’s microprocessor revenue market share was down by 0.7%. According to iSuppli, about half of AMD’s growth within 12 months came at the expense of Intel. The remainder came out of the market-share of smaller suppliers. Regrettably, there is more to say: AMD has lost 2.7% of central processing unit (CPU) market revenue when compared to Q4 2006, at that time it had 15.7% of revenue share.

Microprocessor Prices Do Not Drop, x86 Almost Everywhere

Reflecting the robust demand situation, both Intel and AMD noted that their average selling prices (ASPs) did not decrease in the first quarter compared to the fourth. iSuppli claims that this price stability is another indication that price pressure has decreased and the pricing war between the two microprocessor suppliers has abated.

Perhaps, even better news is that microprocessors based on x86 micro-architecture from AMD and Intel commanded 92.7% of microprocessor revenue worldwide, up 1.4% from the first quarter of 2007. The figures present revenue for the entire global microprocessor market, including x86, RISC and other types of general-purpose microprocessors.