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Post to SlashdotThe increase in Intel’s market share is explained in the first place by the fact that Santa-Clara giant is little by little winning back the positions lost to AMD a while ago. Taking into account Microsoft X-Box consoles, Intel now owns 82.8% of the processor market. And according to the results of Q1 2002 Intel’s share is 80.8%. Compared with what they managed to achieve last year (77.1%) this is quite impressive.
Starting from the beginning of this year, AMD lost 2.6% of the market and now owns only 15.6%. Two other plays, VIA and Transmeta, managed to slightly increase their market share since the beginning of 2002, although their share is still pretty small and doesn’t exceed 2%.
If we disregard the shipments of Intel processors for Microsoft X-Box console, Intel’s and AMD’s shares will now make 81.7% and 16.5% respectively.
All in all, Mercury Research specialists point out a significantly increased demand for budget CPUs. However, similar situation can be observed in other markets as well. The users appear more eager to buy Value graphics cards, low-cost monitors and other equipment.
Despite this fact AMD is losing the market. And this is exactly the company, which has been long offering budget processors with better performance than the alternative solutions from Intel can boast. It might be the considerable price reduction for the slower Pentium 4 CPUs, which has taken place since the beginning of the year, as well as the transition of the Celeron family to NetBurst architecture. Also Intel managed to outpace AMD quite a lot in the high-performance CPU sector. As a result, we see that if at first AMD used to win Intel’s markets, now the things are returning to their natural course.
However, AMD hasn’t yet lost the game. The company reps pin many hopes upon the 8th generation CPUs coming in early 2003. These newcomers are really very likely to cause Santa-Clara’s giant a lot of headaches.
