Advanced Micro Devices managed to sell more processors in the most recent calendar quarter and increase its market share rather significantly, the new figures from Mercury Research that were published on the Internet claim.

In the third quarter of 2005 the Sunnyvale, California-based chipmaker managed to capture 17.8% of the market, up 1.6% from 16.2% in the prior quarter. The Santa Clara, California-based Intel Corp., by contrast, lost 1.4% of its market share and now commands 80.8% of the market, the figures published over DigiTimes web-site show. VIA Technologies supplied 1.4% of all x86 chips, whereas market share of Transmeta Corp. was 0.1%, according to Q3 data from Mercury Research.

The trend that started several quarters ago show that Intel Corp. has been losing desktop market share slowly. Currently Intel commands 77.5% of x86 desktop microprocessor market, whereas AMD’s share is 20.4%, up from 19.6% in the prior quarter and also up 1.2% compared to the Q4 2004. VIA Technologies has also been consistently improving its desktop market share: in Q3 2005 it shipped 2.1% of x86 desktop central processing units (CPUs), whereas in Q4 2004 its share was 1.5%.

While Intel is still the largest supplier of mobile processors, Advanced Micro Devices managed to improve sales of its CPUs for laptops in Q3 by 55% sequentially. The research firm believes that increased sales of mobile chips was conditioned by successful AMD Turion 64 microprocessors with low power consumption.