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The Mercury Research CPU market share results are in for the first quarter of 2023. Although the extreme turbulence in the bottoming PC market continues, signs of recovery appear to be emerging. Though the data is still muddled due to an ongoing inventory correction, this month’s numbers show that Intel has lost sub-single-digit percentage points of share in the three major categories — desktop PC, mobile, and data center — therefore maintaining more than 80% of unit share in each of those categories. That’s actually a surprisingly resilient share of the market six years after AMD launched its incredible comeback with its first-gen Ryzen PC chips back in 2017. Moreover, another report indicates that Intel and AMD’s revenue share of the segments is also shifting as we emerge from the worst CPU downturn in history.
Mercury Research’s last few CPU market updates came amidst shocking market declines and inventory corrections that measured as the largest the firm has recorded in 30 years, ultimately forcing the chipmakers to under-ship demand to balance out overstocked inventories. As such, we had to take the unit share data during that period with some salt because the vendors were under shipping to different degrees and at different times, thus blurring the actual share values. We also expect that some of that continues to impact the numbers released today.
The industry is still mired in the same downturn, but most project that the PC market hit bottom during the last quarter and will stabilize and return to moderate growth through the back half of the year. In fact, AMD CEO Lisa Su recently commented that “[..], we believe the first quarter was the bottom for our client processor business,” signaling that perhaps the worst of the turbulence has passed for AMD’s consumer PCs business. Su’s comments came as the company announced a 64% decline in consumer chip sales as the company lost money for the first time in years.
During Intel’s earnings, company CEO Pat Gelsinger also pointed to signs of improvement in the client PC space, saying, “We are seeing increasing stability in the PC market with inventory corrections largely proceeding as we had expected.” Like AMD, Intel’s message of hope came as it posted devastating results — last week, it reported its largest loss in history as sales plunged 36%.
However, things still aren’t too encouraging in the near term for the server market, with Lisa Su commenting that the company expects demand to remain mixed for now, with some recovery in the second half of the year. Gelsinger also echoed that sentiment, saying, “However, the server and networking markets have yet to reach their bottoms as cloud and enterprise remain weak.”
Here we can see another important metric — x86 PC and data center revenue share — posted to Twitter by independent semiconductor analyst Sravan Kundojjala. This data is composed of Intel and AMD’s reported earnings for each segment, but Kundojjala warns that there is still “a lot of noise in this data” due to shipments and inventories. As you can see, AMD’s peak of 21.9% of PC revenue occurred back in the second quarter of 2022, while its data center peak of 30.3% revenue share happened in the fourth quarter.
We asked Intel for a comment on the general state of the market. “Intel is seeing increasing stability in the data center and PC markets. We remain confident in our growth projections as the market recovers over the second half of 2023. Our client computing business continues to execute on its roadmap as we ramp Meteor Lake production ahead of its 2H 2023 launch,” an Intel representative responded. “[..] with a strengthening roadmap and excellent execution, we believe you will see our market share grow as we deliver process and product leadership to the market. Demand for 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors continues to be strong [..].”
But while AMD remains a threat to Intel’s market share and continues to chip away slowly, it is even more of a threat to Intel’s margins. Intel has been forced to price aggressively in both PCs and the data center to staunch its share losses, which impacts profitability — as is painfully clear with the company’s historically low margins over the last several quarters. AMD also just launched its Ryzen 7000X3D chips, which take the lead in gaming over Intel’s competing Raptor Lake chips. While those 7000X3D chips are comparatively expensive and will likely ship in much lower volumes, AMD’s ability to now claim it has the best CPU for gaming will restrict Intel’s ability to command premium pricing for its competing chips.
Other forces are also in play. Arm remains a persistent threat, but its initial bullrush into the PC unit share has seemed to cool a bit as it lost 1.3 percentage points in the fourth quarter of 2023. However, given the market conditions, we’ll take that with a grain of salt until conditions stabilize. We’re still waiting on Arm’s share value for this quarter, but regardless, Apple’s M-series processors have rapidly gained a foothold in the market. As such, despite much lower shipments recently, we should expect Arm to continue to chew away share from x86 in the client market over the longer term.
The raw numbers from the Mercury Research report are broken down by segment in the sections below. We’ll follow up and add comments on the segments from Mercury’s Dean McCarron when the full report is sent to the press in within the coming day, so check back for an update soon.
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| Row 0 – Cell 0 | 1Q23 | 4Q22 | 3Q22 | 2Q22 | 1Q22 | 4Q21 | 3Q21 | 2Q21 | 1Q21 | 4Q20 | 3Q20 | 2Q20 | 1Q20 | 4Q19 | 3Q19 | 2Q19 | 1Q2019 | 4Q18 | 3Q18 | 2Q18 | 1Q18 | 4Q17 | 3Q17 | 2Q17 | 1Q17 | 4Q16 | 3Q16 |
| AMD Desktop Unit Share | 19.2% | 18.6% | 13.9% | 20.5% | 18.3% | 16.2% | 17.0% | 17.1% | 19.3% | 19.3% | 20.1% | 19.2% | 18.6% | 18.3% | 18% | 17.1% | 17.1% | 15.8% | 13% | 12.3% | 12.2% | 12.0% | 10.9% | 11.1% | 11.4% | 9.9% | 9.1% |
| Quarter over Quarter / Year over Year (pp) | +0.6 / +0.9 | +4.7 / +2.4 | -6.6 / -3.1 | +2.2 / +3.4 | +2.1 / -1.0 | -0.8 / -3.1 | -0.1 / -3.1 | -2.3 / -2.1 | +0.1 / +0.7 | -0.8 / +1.0 | +0.9 / +2.1 | +0.6 / +2.1 | +0.3 / +1.5 | +0.3 / +2.4 | +0.9 / +5 | Flat / +4.8 | +1.3 / +4.9 | +2.8 / +3.8 | +0.7 / +2.1 | +0.1 / +1.2 | +0.2 / +0.8 | +1.1 / +2.1 | -0.2 / +1.8 | -0.3 / – | +1.5 / – | +0.8 / – | – |
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| Row 0 – Cell 0 | 1Q23 | 4Q22 | 3Q22 | 2Q22 | 1Q22 | 4Q21 | 3Q21 | 2Q21 | 1Q21 | 4Q20 | 3Q20 | 2Q20 | 1Q20 | Q419 | 3Q19 | 2Q19 | 1Q2019 | 4Q18 | 3Q18 | 2Q18 |
| AMD Mobile Unit Share | 16.2% | 16.4% | 15.7% | 24.8% | 22.5% | 21.6% | 22.0% | 20.0% | 18.0% | 19% | 20.2% | 19.9% | 17.1% | 16.2% | 14.7% | 14.1% | 13.1% | 12.2% | 10.9% | 8.8% |
| Quarter over Quarter / Year over Year (pp) | -0.2 / -6.3 | +0.8 / -5.1 | -9.1 / -6.4 | +2.3 / +4.8 | +0.9 / +4.4 | -0.4 / +2.6 | +2.0 / +1.8 | +1.9 / +0.01 | -1.0 / +1.1 | -1.2 / +2.8 | +0.3 / +5.5 | +2.9 / +5.8 | +0.9 / +3.2 | +1.5 / +4.0 | +0.7 / +3.8 | +1.0 / +5.3 | +0.9 / ? | Row 2 – Cell 18 | Row 2 – Cell 19 | Row 2 – Cell 20 |
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| Row 0 – Cell 0 | 1Q23 | 4Q22 | 3Q22 | 2Q22 | 1Q22 | 4Q21 | 3Q21 | 2Q21 | 1Q21 | 4Q20 | 3Q20 | 2Q20 | 1Q20 | 4Q19 | 3Q19 | 2Q19 | 1Q2019 | 4Q18 | 3Q18 | 2Q18 | 4Q17 |
| AMD Server Unit Share | 18% | 17.6% | 17.5% | 13.9% | 11.6% | 10.7% | 10.2% | 9.5% | 8.9% | 7.1% | 6.6% | 5.8% | 5.1% | 4.5% | 4.3% | 3.4% | 2.9% | 3.2% | 1.6% | 1.4% | 0.8% |
| Quarter over Quarter / Year over Year (pp) | +0.4 / +6.3 | +0.1 / +6.9 | +3.6 / +7.3 | +2.3 / +4.4 | +0.9 / +2.7 | +0.5% / +3.6 | +0.7 / +3.6 | +0.6 / +3.7 | +1.8 / +3.8 | +0.5 / +2.6 | +0.8 / +2.3 | +0.7 / +2.4 | +0.6 / 2.2 | +0.2 / +1.4 | +0.9 / +2.7 | +0.5 / +2.0 | -0.3 / – | +1.6 / 2.4 | +0.2 / – | Row 2 – Cell 20 | Row 2 – Cell 21 |
AMD bases its server share projections on IDC’s forecasts but only accounts for the single- and dual-socket market, which eliminates four-socket (and beyond) servers, networking infrastructure, and Xeon D’s (edge). As such, Mercury’s numbers differ from the numbers cited by AMD, which predicts a higher market share. Here is AMD’s comment on the matter: “Mercury Research captures all x86 server-class processors in their server unit estimate, regardless of device (server, network or storage), whereas the estimated 1P [single-socket] and 2P [two-socket] TAM [Total Addressable Market] provided by IDC only includes traditional servers.”
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| Arm vs x86 Market Share | 1Q23 | 4Q22 | 3Q22 | 2Q22 | 1Q22 | 4Q21 | 3Q21 | 2Q21 | 1Q21 | 4Q20 | 2Q20 |
| Arm Unit Share | ? | 13.3% | 14.6% | 9.4% | 11.3% | 10.3% | 8.9% | ~7.0% | 5.9% | 3.4% | Less than 2% |
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| Row 0 – Cell 0 | 1Q23 | 4Q22 | 3Q22 | 2Q22 | 1Q22 | 4Q21 | 3Q21 | 2Q21 | 1Q21 | 4Q20 | 3Q20 | 2Q20 | 1Q20 | 4Q19 | 3Q19 | 2Q19 | 4Q18 | 3Q18 |
| AMD Overall x86 | ? | 31.3% | 28.5% | 31.4% | 27.7% | 25.6% | 24.6% | 22.5% | 20.7% | 21.7% | 22.4% | 18.3% | 14.8% | 15.1% | 14.6% | 13.9% | 12.3% | 10.6% |
| Overall PP Change QoQ / YoY | ? | +2.8 / +5.7 | -2.9 / +3.9 | +3.7 / +8.9 | +2.1 / +7.0 | +1.0 / +3.9 | +2.1 / +2.2 | +1.8 / +4.2 | -1.0 / +6.0 | -0.7 / +6.2 | +4.1 / +6.6 | +3.5 / +1.2 (+3.7?) | -0.7 / ? | +0.9 / +3.2 | +0.7 / +4 | ? | ? | – |
Whereas the other segments above exclude IoT and semi-custom units (like AMD’s game console business), this accounting of the overall x86 market also includes those products.
We’re still waiting on the full update, but we’ll plug in these numbers once we receive them.
The post AMD and Intel CPU Market Share Report: Recovery on the Horizon | Tom’s Hardware first appeared on www.tomshardware.com
