In the first quarter of 2005 Advanced Micro Devices continued the trend towards increasing microprocessor unit shipments as well as its market share. The world’s main supplier of chips, Intel Corp., saw its market share tumbling insignificantly, but also managed to raise its shipments in terms of volume.

AMD’s currently commands 16.9% of the x86 central processing units market, up about 1.9% from the first quarter of 2004 and an increase of 0.3% sequentially, according to market research figures by Mercury Research. Intel’s market share is now 81.7%, or down 0.5% compared to the Q4 2004 and 1.8% annually. The remaining 1.4% of the market we shared by chip designers like VIA Technologies and Transmeta Corp.

AMD was helped by its AMD Opteron server chips and desktop chips targeted at different segments, according to The Street web-site. Mercury’s Dean McCarron told eWeek web-site that AMD managed to gain ground aided by a better-sorted value line of processors. He emphasized that AMD Opteron gains were “small but steady”.

Due to strong demand for notebooks during the last couple of quarters, Intel’s shipments of mobile processors broke record in the Q1, which is claimed to be the primary driver of Intel’s increasing shipments.

“I’ve seen a dramatic increase in mobile [processor] unit shipments [from Intel]… From what I had seen, it was a fairly significant departure from normal trends. The numbers are indicative of a pretty fundamental change in the PC market,” said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research.

PC processor market share figures include desktop, notebook and server processors. Desktop processors shipments usually outnumber the other two categories combined, however in the Q4 2004 and Q1 2005 research firms indicated notebooks were selling exceptionally well, which boosted market share for Intel and might have hidden AMD’s potential success in the desktops.