A very respectful Dataquest corporation has recently made a very curious report. According to their research, the Pentium 4 processor price drop had a significant influence on the ... sales of the value Intel Celeron CPUs. They claim that in Q3 2001 the market share of Intel Celeron processors dropped down to 20.9%, while it used to be around 27.2% a year ago. As for the Pentium 4 processors share, it has grown from 0% (the CPUs came out in the end of 2000) up to 23.9%.
Since the data provided by Dataquest have always been very accurate, we can easily use them as they are for all further calculations of ours. As is known, in the end of Q4 2001 Intel owned around 80% of the PC processor market, while AMD’s share made 20%. VIA CPUs hardly occupied over 1% of the market, so we can simply disregard it now. Bearing in mind the overall Intel’s market share, we can state that Pentium III CPUs owned 35% of the market in Q3 2001, which was considerably more than the Pentium 4 CPUs market.
Of course, Intel couldn’t be happy with this state of things (they planned that the Pentium 4 / Pentium III ratio will be around 3:1 by the end of the year), so they kept dropping the Pentium 4 processor prices. However, they couldn’t cope with the growing demand and the CPUs appeared in great shortage. Pentium III and Celeron sales went down and the growth of Pentium 4 sales failed to make up for that. No wonder that AMD market share in Q4 2001 increased by some 7% (up to 27%, according to this news story). In fact, things could have turned much worse, if AMD had greater production capacities at its disposal. We believe that this fact was exactly the one to push Intel to move its Celeron family to a new 0.13micron core very quickly: the company intended to increase the Celeron market share and to regain the PC enthusiasts’ respect at one ample swoop.
And in general, it would be really interesting to take a closer look at Dataquest report for Q4 2001. Then we will definitely have fewer uncertainties about the situation in the processor market.