Shipments of chipsets for mainboards have declined 12% sequentially in the first quarter of the year, however, there is one chipset designer who not only maintained steady increase in market share, but also managed to boost its volumes in the Q1: ATI Technologies.

A report from Mercury Research released for clients on Monday claims that in the first quarter of 2006 there were 67.3 million core-logic sets shipped. Intel Corp. has maintained its largest market share of 57%, down significantly from the Q1 2005 as a result of its withdrawal from entry-level chipset market, Via Technologies was commanding 15% of the core-logic market, down 1% sequentially and flat annually. ATI Technologies, whose market share was only 3% a year ago, could boast with 12% share in Q1 2006 and become the world’s No.3 chipset provider. Meanwhile both Nvidia Corp. and Silicon Integrated Systems supplied less chipsets than in the prior quarter and had 9% and 6% market share, according to the report.

The only company that posted increases in both overall chipsets market share in Q1 2006 was ATI Technologies, who benefited from increase supplies of its chipset products for both AMD and Intel platforms. According to Mercury Research, ATI has increased its core-logic shipments by 485.7% annually.

The majority of chipsets sold were products intended for systems running Intel’s quad pumped bus (Intel Pentium 4, Intel Pentium D, Intel Core, Intel Pentium Extreme Edition, Intel Celeron, etc): about 77.4% of all chipsets sold were designed for Intel’s chips. Among those products, Intel, Via, ATI and SiS shipped 74%, 12%, 8%, 6% of core-logic sets respectively.

AMD’s 64-bit platform chipsets accounted for roughly 21% of the market during the Q1 2006, with Nvidia Corp. shipping the highest portion of them – about 42%, ATI supplying 28% of all AMD64 core-logic sets and Via and SiS commanding 21% and 9% of the market respectively. Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia posted 7% market share growth amid 10% declines in volumes, whereas ATI’s share increased 10% amid 18% shipments increase.

Neither of the aforementioned companies commented on the news-story.