Intel and AMD in third quarter stalemate

Intel and AMD maintained pretty much the same market share in the third quarter, according to chip market watcher iSuppli.

By iSuppli's reckoning, Intel squeaked out an extra tenth of a point of market share in the third quarter, garnering 80.1 per cent of global microprocessor revenues, while AMD lost seven-tenths of a per cent of share, falling to 11.3 per cent of total CPU sales. On a sequential basis, Intel lost some ground, since it had 80.4 per cent of revenues in Q2 of this year, and AMD lost a little as well, since it had 11.5 per cent of the CPU revenue pie worldwide in the second quarter.

Others - which include everything else, such as ARM, MIPS, Power, and other CPUs - saw their share grow in Q3, accounting for 8.6 per cent of CPU sales. How much of this change is due to ARM, iSuppli did not say.

iSuppli thinks that the there is a pretty good chance that market share could slosh around a bit next year, with Intel putting out "Sandy Bridge" PC and server parts and AMD putting put Fusion PC and updated Opteron parts.

"There remains a very competitive situation between the two dominant suppliers," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for compute platforms at iSuppli, in a statement accompanying the figures. "In particular, we look forward to seeing the effect that AMD’s forthcoming Fusion products might have on the share situation for these two mega-players."

Wilkins said that microprocessor revenues rose by 23 per cent in the third quarter, but did not provide a revenue figure. (You have to pay big bucks for that data.) Revenues were up 3 per cent sequentially from the second quarter, which Wilkins said was healthy growth sequentially. ®

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