Perhaps, AMD’s graphics product group is taking back the lost land on the market of graphics cards with the release of the ATI Radeon HD 4000-series chips, but on the market of central processing units AMD continues to struggle. According to IDC, in the Q2 2008 the company again lost unit market share to Intel Corp., despite of the launch of triple-core chips and low-power quad-core products.

CPU Market Raises in Units, Drops in Revenue

Worldwide PC microprocessor shipments in the second calendar quarter of 2008 reached record levels again, according to new data from IDC. Despite the fact that the second quarter is typically the slowest quarter of the calendar year for processor demand and concerns that the economic woes in the U.S. are spreading to other regions, worldwide processor unit shipments grew 3.1% quarter over quarter and 16.1% year over year.

However, strong vendor price competition in the middle and low end of the desktop PC processor and mobile PC processor market segments caused overall market revenue to decline 4.5% quarter over quarter to $7.7 billion.

“While sequential market growth is unusual in the second quarter of the calendar year, it’s clear that, in Q2 2008, Intel’s processor shipments drove the growth. Intel’s processor shipments alone grew nearly 4.3% over the first quarter and 20.8% year over year, while AMD’s processor shipments were about flat,” said Shane Rau, director of semiconductors: personal computing research at IDC.

Intel Continues to Win, AMD Keeps on Losing

In terms of processor vendor shares, on an overall unit basis, Intel earned 79.7% market share, a gain of 0.9%. AMD earned 19.7%, a loss of 1.2%, quarter-over-quarter. Via Technologies commanded 0.6% of the PC CPU market. A little less than a year ago AMD’s market share was 23.5%, whereas Intel commanded 76.3%, which means that AMD is continuing to gradually lose its market share.

By form factor, in the mobile PC processor segment, Intel earned 86.5% share, a gain of 1.3% and AMD earned 12.6%, a loss of 1.9%. Via Technologies, based in Taiwan, earned 0.9% share, a gain of 0.7%.

In the PC server/workstation processor segment, Intel earned 86.2%, a loss of 0.8% and AMD earned 13.8%, a gain of 0.8%.

In the desktop PC processor segment, Intel earned 73.3% share and AMD earned 26.4%; share changes were negligible.

PC Processor Market to Expand

IDC forecasts that PC processor market revenue will grow 7.5% in 2008 to more than $32.8 billion.

“While processor unit shipments exceeded our forecast in Q2 2008, Intel’s aggressive approach to the market, through both product and pricing, point to a major, supply-side variable. However, economic concerns cause us to maintain our conservative outlook for the second half of the year,” said Mr. Rau.

Tags: Intel, AMD, Market share