Even if Intel is still the dominating processor manufacturer AMD has been improving its market situation quite a lot the last few years, especially on the to Intel important server market. A market where Intel has continued to dominate more than ever is the mobile market where Pentium M has been withstanding AMD’s attacks very well. Ironically it seems the winds have changed though as new reports indicate that AMD is starting to gain on the mobile market but has instead started to lose ground on the server market. The figures are for the third quarter of 2006 and show that AMD has been able to increase its overall presence on the processor market.
Overall, Intel shipped 76.1 percent of all desktop, notebook and server processors that use the x86 instruction set during the quarter. AMD owned 23.3 percent of that market. AMD’s overall momentum continued; a year ago, Intel had 80.7 percent of the market while AMD held 17.7 percent. Mercury Research measures the number of chips shipped into distribution channels, not the breakdown of how processors appear in end systems.
It’s pretty clear that the launch of Xeon 5100 series (Woodcrest) is what has brought back the shares to Intel. The new Core architecture has with nice performance/watt ratio been received with arms wide open on the server market. The development on the server market is going to be interesting to follow as Intel seems to be the fastest growing party at the moment.
