AMD Hits Record X86 CPU Market Share As Intel Supply Stalls In Q1
AMD gained more ground on rival Intel in x86 market share, with fresh figures from Mercury Research's latest report showing AMD hitting an all-time high at 32.6%. The good news for Intel is that it is still dominating, though it's 67.4% share of the overall x86 CPU market is down sequentially from 68.6% and down from 72.9% in the same quarter a year ago.
In the course of a year, AMD went from owning a little better than a quarter of the overall x86 CPU market to a sliver below a third. Note that this includes every type of CPU, including client chips, server processors, and both embedded IoT and semi-custom SoCs. This is an important distinction, as AMD has a stranglehold on the console market.
Source: Mercury Research
According to the report, AMD "surprisingly" did not experience a very strong drop in its console SoC business, while Intel's IoT business was softer. The report doesn't get into specifics, but we assume it's surprising due to a combination of the latest generation consoles from Microsoft and Sony becoming long in the tooth, and multiple price hikes for systems that are approaching six years since launch.
If taking embedded semi-custom SoCs and IoT chips out of the equation, AMD's share sits at 30%, which is a gain from 29.3% in the previous quarter and from 24.4% year-over-year. According to the report, both Intel and AMD saw lower unit shipments sequentially, but Intel's drop was more significant, pushing AMD's share to a new record high.
"The impact of
Intel's supply constraints—and AMD's long chain of incremental
share gains—was far more obvious in the on-year comparison, as
AMD's unit shipments increased by nearly 17% compared to a
year ago, while Intel's shipments declined by more than 10%, resulting in a 5.6 point increase in overall share on
year for AMD," the report states.
Source: Mercury Research
More significantly for both firms, AMD saw chunky gains in the high margin data center that is thriving on AI demand. AMD's server CPU share (excluding IoT) nudged just above a third of the market at 33.2%, up from 30% in the previous quarter an up from 27.2% in the same quarter a year ago.
"While Intel's server CPU shipments were
relatively flat both sequentially and on-year, AMD's server
volumes were up very strongly for both comparisons, resulting in
significant share gain, especially on-year. Both suppliers
continue to indicate the outlook for 2026 server CPUs is very good
and accelerating," Mercury Research adds.
A bright spot for Intel was the desktop CPU market, where it increased its share to 66.8% versus 63.6% in the previous quarter. However, that's still down from 72% a year ago. And in mobile, the split between Intel and AMD is 71.7% versus 28.3%. Going back a full year, Intel enjoyed a wider lead at 77.5% versus 22.5%.
It will be interesting to see what the next few quarters bring, and for a number of reasons. For one, Intel is cruising along on its cutting-edge 18A node, including its Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest launch this week. It's also worth keeping eye on NVIDIA's entrance into the PC platform space (outside of solely GPUs) with RTX Spark.
