The global PC market is entering into a period of uncertainty as the pandemic begins to recede. This is causing demand for PCs and components to decline for the first time in years. Despite this gloomy forecast, AMD is making steady progress. Market analyst Mercury Research have released its Q1 2022 report, and it shows AMD chipping away at Intel's market share in multiple markets. Before you get your violin out for Chipzilla, Mercury's numbers show it still dominates AMD in every market where they directly compete.
Overall AMD ended Q1 with a 27.7 percent market share for x86 processors, according to a summary posted by Techspot(Opens in a new window). This includes all its x86 CPUs, including custom SoCs and chips for IoT. This represents a seven percent gain for AMD year-over-year. It took that market share directly from Intel, of course. Intel went from 79.3 percent market share a year a year ago to 72.3 percent. This allowed AMD to rise from 20.7 percent to 27.7 percent market share in the past year. This breaks AMD's previous market share record of 25.6 percent, which it achieved in Q4 2021. According to Mercury Research's numbers (below), AMD made market share progress in every category.
On the desktop side of the equation (excluding IoT), AMD gained 1.9 percent market share but still ended up with one percent less than it had a year ago. Intel is still crushing it with over 80 percent of the market. It's the same situation for servers, with Intel holding 88.4 percent market share. That's still 2.7 percent less than a year ago, however. This shows AMD is like the turtle in this race, slowly eating away at Intel's market dominance.
On the mobile front AMD picked up a laudable 4.4 percent of the market from Intel thanks to the launch of its 6000-series Zen 3+ chips. It also launched Pro version of these CPUs, but it's unclear if they had any impact. This is the opposite of what some analysts predicted would happen this year. As we reported previously, it was predicted AMD would lose mobile market share to Intel while making gains in server CPUs. However, this is just the first quarter, so there's much to be written still about how these companies fare in 2022.
Despite AMD's successful quarter, there was still a worrisome trend. Mercury president Dean McCarron noted in the report that desktop CPU shipments dropped 30 percent last quarter. That is the largest single-quarter drop in history. The dramatic slowdown is due to weakened demand for PCs coupled with COVID-19 lockdowns abroad, and the seemingly never-ending chip shortage.
It'll be interesting to see what the second quarter of 2022 brings us. The pandemic is indeed beginning to fade away, and inventories seem to be returning to normal. We've already reported on GPU prices returning to sanity, which will no doubt aided by the recent crypto crash. Intel also just launched its flagship mobile CPUs while AMD launched its first V-Cache CPU alongside a slew of revamped desktop CPUs. AMD also just launched Zen 3 CPUs for Chromebooks as well. Despite this being "lull" between architectures for both companies, they are still going at it hammer and tongs.
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