AMD takes further x86 market share from Intel
More than 30 percent of x86 processors sold between July and September were supplied by AMD. Last year, this figure was only 25 percent.
Desktop PC processors from Intel (left) and AMD.
(Image: Mark Mantel/heise medien)
In the decades-long rivalry between processor companies AMD and Intel, AMD continues to gain ground, at least according to market research firm Mercury Research. The company reports that AMD's share of the x86 processor market grew to 30.9 percent in the third quarter of 2025, based on unit sales.
That's a significant 5.9 percentage points more than the previous year. Sequentially, AMD's market share increased by 1.5 percentage points.
Price War
The respective quarterly results from AMD and Intel already indicated a price war in client processors, meaning CPUs for notebooks and desktop PCs. The latter now only account for around 30 percent of client processors, especially since many of the popular mini-PCs also contain mobile processors. While the average selling price of Intel processors came under pressure, AMD was able to increase profits.
Mercury Research also emphasizes that AMD was able to sell a particularly large number of chips for game consoles like the PlayStation and Xbox.
Market observers also estimate that Intel sold significantly fewer processors for budget notebooks. On the one hand, Intel has low-cost chips like the Celeron N150 in its product range, but it also sells older Core i types from the 1200 and 1300 series. There are signs that many companies are procuring notebooks as cheaply as possible for the transition to Windows 11. AMD also continues to offer older CPU series for affordable devices and has renamed some of them multiple times.
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ARM Pressure
For x86 notebooks, AMD's processor share increased sequentially by 1.4 percentage points to 21.9 percent, but this was 0.4 points lower than a year ago. AMD performed strongest in desktop PCs, where its Ryzen share now stands at 33.6 percent (+4.9 percent compared to Q3/2024).
The share of client computers with ARM processors is also increasing, according to Mercury Research, to now 13.6 percent. The lion's share of this is accounted for by Apple computers; Mercury does not separately mention the share of Windows 11 notebooks with Qualcomm Snapdragon X. ARM SoCs, besides those from Qualcomm, are also reportedly being used more in Chromebooks, including those from Mediatek.
Servers
In x86 servers, AMD increased the market share of its Epyc CPUs at the expense of Xeons by 3.5 percentage points to 27.8 percent. Mercury Research assumes that the server market remained largely unchanged sequentially, whereas it often slightly declines in the third quarter.
(ciw)
