CPU market shares: AMD continues to grow, hardly any ARM growth so far

ARM and Qualcomm expect every second PC to have a processor with ARM cores by 2029. And Windows 11 laptops with the powerful Qualcomm Snadragon X Elite have been available on the market for almost five months.

However, in the third quarter of 2024, estimates by Mercury Research still show no significant increase in the ARM market share for notebooks and desktop PCs. Although around 10.3 percent of these devices contain processors with ARM microarchitecture, these come almost exclusively from Apple, as was previously the case. The ARM market share in the segments analyzed thus corresponds almost exactly to Apple's market share.

Almost 90 percent of all desktop PCs and notebooks and an even higher proportion of servers are therefore equipped with x86 processors from AMD or Intel. AMD gained a little more ground, but the balance of power remains roughly 25 to 75. Mercury Research emphasizes that the ARM market share in Chinese servers is unclear, as it has only limited insight into this region.

Different developments

If one takes a closer look at individual sub-segments of the x86 market, Mercury Research notes different developments. According to the report, Intel's desktop CPU unit numbers have shrunk because PC manufacturers are reducing inventories – No wonder, as the new desktop PC CPU generation Core Ultra 200S (Arrow Lake) was launched just a few weeks ago and older versions of the predecessors had annoying bugs.

Marktanteil von AMD bei x86-Prozessoren (Quelle: Mercury Research)
Quartal	Q3 2024	Q2 2024	Q3 2023
Desktop-PC	28,7 %	23,0 %	19,2 %
Mobil	22,3 %	20,3 %	19,5 %
Server	24,2 %	24,1 %	23,3 %
x86 Gesamt ohne IoT & Spielkonsolen	25,0 %	21,3 %	17,2 %
x86 Gesamt inkl. IoT & Spielkonsolen	24,0 %	24,6 %	30,7 %

As a result, the market share of AMD processors for desktop PCs rose sequentially by 5.7 percentage points to 28.7% and by almost 10 percentage points year-on-year.

Intel fared better with mobile processors and was able to increase sales. However, sales of notebook Ryzens also grew, with AMD increasing its market share by 2 percentage points to 22.3%.

In the server segment, the new sixth-generation Xeons slowed Intel's downward trend. The share of AMD's Epyc server processors grew by just 0.1 percent sequentially and 0.9 percent year-on-year to 24.2 percent in terms of unit sales.

AMD strong in servers

Comparing the quarterly figures of AMD and Intel, AMD's "Data Center" division achieved higher sales than Intel's Data Center and AI (DCAI) division for the first time, at just under USD 3.55 billion: The latter came in at just 3.35 billion US dollars, around 5.6 percent less. This was mainly due to AMD's growing sales of AI accelerators from the Instinct MI series, while Intel has largely missed out on the AI hype so far. Nevertheless, some Gaudi 3 systems are now on the market.

AMD's once important business with gaming console chips is shrinking, as is that with Radeon GPUs. AMD is now where Intel wanted to be several years ago: More than 50 percent of sales come from the profitable data center sector.

(ciw)