Ever since the introduction of Ryzen, AMD’s market shares have been on an upward trend. However, since the second quarter of last year, things weren’t looking good for the company as Intel took back a chunk of the market share with the news and introduction of Alder Lake. But, AMD seems to be back at Intel in the first quarter of 2022, as reports from Mercury Research CPU markets share results indicate.
Apart from IoT and SoC products, every major segment in the x86 chip market lost sales during Q1 2022. Desktop PC sales took a massive hit as numbers declined by a staggering 30%. This marks the largest fall in sales ever in history. Also, this fall is a bit surprising because the chip shortage has finally started to reside and building a desktop computer now is the cheapest in the last two years.
But, AMD’s market share values are impressive. Almost 27.7% of the x86 chips in the market are AMD-manufactured. The number is up by a solid 7% since last year. The company has made significant gains on both the desktop and mobile fronts.
But, the fall in desktop PC sales means that both AMD and Intel sold lesser chips. The loss in sales affected Intel more severely than AMD, which caused the latter to gain market share. Most industry experts are attributing this loss to vendors burning through excess CPU inventory and not a loss of interest in desktop PCs. AMD CEO Lisa Su also indicated that the company is expecting PC sales to keep falling in the upcoming months.
Apart from this, this quarter also saw Arm-based desktop PC shares increase to almost 11.3%. Arm’s introduction into the CPU market is largely led by Apple and their M1 chips. Before its introduction, Arm’s market share was just at a paltry 5.9% two years ago. From there, it had increased to 10.3% in Q4 2021, and we are at over 11%.
