Advanced Micro Devices has managed to increase its market share slightly in the third quarter of 2010, according to market tracking company Mercury Research. Despite of the change, it is too small to make a significant impact on both companies.

Intel's share on the market of x86 chips dropped by 0.4% to 80%.9 in the Q3 2010, according to Mercury Research cited by eWeek web-site. By contrast, AMD's share increased by 0.5% to 18.3%, whereas Via Technologies now commands just 0.8%, even below than a quarter before. The reason why AMD managed to improve its share is claimed to be lower impact of weak mobile processor sales during the quarter onto the company than on its larger rival.

“AMD had mild share gains by having a slightly higher rate of growth than Intel. This is due in part to AMD having a higher mix of desktop CPUs. This quarter's results were disproportionately impacted by a weak mobile CPU market, which affected Intel more than AMD as Intel has a much higher share of the mobile market," the statement of Mercury reads.

Even though generally speaking central processing units by Intel offer higher performance compared to those from Advanced Micro Devices, a lot of people nowadays look at overall benefits of new PC platforms as well as actual price. As a result, many of AMD's offerings beat competing products based on Intel's chips.

Mercury Research predicts that the market of microprocessors will only grow by 2.7% in the fourth quarter compared to normal seasonal growth of approximately 8%, a bad news for AMD, Intel as well as manufacturers of actual systems.

Tags: AMD, , Intel, Business, mercury research, Via Technologies