CIBC World Markets research company unveiled their report covering market shares of leading x86 microprocessor suppliers, namely Intel and AMD. Needless to say that the latter was not as successful as the former due to loads of reasons headed by overall condition of the market and the fact that AMD was unable to supply high-end processors on time.

As you probably remember, Intel managed to occupy about 86.4% (or, 84.8%, according to Intel) of the CPU market in units in the third quarter 2002, the highest market share they could boast with during the last four years (see this news-story), about 7.1% increase compared to the third quarter 2001 and approximately 4% boost from the second quarter last year. Such high share was conditioned by the fact that AMD wanted their partners to clear-out the stocks, hence, AMD’s own sales dropped and the company had to report lower than expected sales. In the fourth quarter their market share rebounded to about 17% in units, while Intel’s tumbled to 83%.

In terms of units Intel’s share in 2002 was 82.5%, up more than 4 points from 78.3% a year ago. AMD sold nearly 17.5% of desktop CPUs last year.

As for revenues and average selling prices, Intel's market share increased from 88.7% in 2001, to 91.8% in 2002, leaving AMD with only 8.2% of dollars share of the market, down from 11.3% a year ago.

Considering the lowering ASPs and revenues we fully understand AMD’s recent move to start pushing the Opteron processors to the server market. As CPUs for high-end workstations and servers are much more expensive compared to desktop computers intended brethrens, AMD should earn more selling the Opteron chips rather than pushing the Athlon64 processors in the current situation, when the company still experiences difficulties with achieving higher speeds for the x86-64 CPUs (see this news-story).