AMD Gains CPU Market Share At Intel’s Expense

It looks like AMD is doing better than the enthusiast community might think these days, considering they have managed to gain market share against rival Intel in the first quarter of 2012. Apparently Intel had been sitting at a market share of 81% this time last year, has now dropped to 80.2%, meanwhile AMD rose from 18.2% to 19.1%. What is really interesting is according to Dean McCarron of Mercury Research, AMD is strong when it comes to desktop processors with a healthy 43% of the market. AMD’s desktop processor sales have increased due in part to hard disk drive shipments having stabilized which has helped the company recover. The big winner however for AMD has been entry level laptops featuring Llano A-series APUs which have contributed to the company’s increase in market share. For the time being, Intel has the advantage over AMD due to Ivy Bridge and their 22nm process, however should AMD manage to release competitive and more power efficient products based on Trinity APUs and Brazos 2.0 they may yet manage to gain a bit more market share against rival Intel. However this depends on how soon they manage to release higher-margin products and finally scale down to mainstream laptops and desktops.