ARM exceeds 10 percent CPU market share in notebooks and servers

ARM processors are becoming more and more widespread. An ARM processor is expected to be installed in 13.9% of all desktop PCs and notebooks sold in the first quarter of 2025. This is the estimate of Mercury Research, a market observer specializing in CPUs. At the end of 2024, it was still 10.9 percent, according to him.

Across all desktop PCs, notebooks, servers and other products such as games consoles, ARM is expected to have reached a share of 11.9 percent in the first quarter of 2025 –, breaking the 10 percent mark for the first time.

More ARM in notebooks and servers

ARM Chromebooks in particular are said to have sold surprisingly well at the start of 2025. These are mostly equipped with CPUs from Mediatek and Qualcomm.

There is also a moderate increase in Windows-on-ARM devices with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processors. Apple accounts for the lion's share with its M chips, although Apple's sales are expected to have fallen by the beginning of 2025. Mercury does not provide specific figures.

In desktop PCs, only Apple is currently represented with ARM processors. However, as notebooks are sold much more frequently than desktop PCs – at a ratio of around 3:1 –, the small PC offering is hardly noticeable in the figures.

Among servers, the ARM market share is expected to increase mainly due to Nvidia's Grace processor, which is located on the GH200 (Hopper) and GB200 (Blackwell) boards. If only large server processors, which are primarily intended for data centers, are taken into account, ARM is expected to have a share of 13.2 percent at the beginning of 2025. The remaining 86.8 percent of newly sold servers will be equipped with x86 CPUs from AMD (Epyc) and Intel (Xeon-SP). Edge and network processors are explicitly excluded here.

Growth for AMD

Apart from the ARM growth, the start of the year also looks good for AMD. As usual in the first quarter of the year, the number of desktop CPUs sold fell, but less sharply than for Intel. This results in a market share of 28 percent.

AMD is also said to have sold many expensive high-end processors such as the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. As a result, the average CPU sales price (ASP) has risen significantly. Mercury estimates that AMD must have achieved a new record in sales of desktop CPUs, even though unit sales were only half as high as in the strongest sales quarters.

AMD market shares in x86 processors (source: Mercury Research)
Category	Q1/25	Q4/24	Q1/24
Server	27,2%	25,1%	23,6%
Desktop	28,0%	27,1%	23,9%
Mobile	22,5%	23,7%	19,3%
x86 total	27,1%	24,7%	26,1%

Both x86 manufacturers also have to accept falling sales figures for notebooks. Because Intel is losing ground here less than AMD, AMD's market share has fallen to 22.5 percent. Intel's low-cost models under the name "Intel Processor" (without Core) are said to have done well.

AMD continues to make steady gains in x86 servers. In the current analysis, 27.2 percent of all x86 CPUs for servers come from AMD. Limited to large models for data centers, i.e. without edge, network & co., AMD's Epyc processors are even said to account for 35.9 percent against Intel's Xeon-SP – a record value.

Last but not least, the console market surprised. While it continued to slump in 2024 due to the advanced age of the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, demand is expected to have risen significantly again by the beginning of 2025. Including all x86 processors, AMD has a market share of 27.1 percent.

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