AMD Surges On Hot EPYC And Ryzen X3D Demand To Chip Away At Intel Share
Folks, we're living in some strange and wild times. Don't worry, we're not diving into politics or anything like that—we know how to say in our lane, which is technology. And as it relates to tech, the latest market share results by Mercury Research highlight some interesting and unexpected trends, most of which are to the benefit of AMD and its effort to capture more market share from rival Intel.
Starting with the desktop, Mercury Research president Dean McCarron called it a "quite unusual" first quarter for desktop processor activity. Why is that? Traditionally, high-end consumer desktop chips see a decline in activity right after the holiday season. Likewise, what most often happens is that business PCs account for most high-end desktop CPU sales. These two factors usually combine to knock AMD's CPU market share down a peg or two. Not this time—there's a lot of excitement over AMD's latest X3D processors (see our Ryzen 9 9950X review and also our Ryzen 7 9800X3D review).
"This year, however, the market
behaved nothing like this, with a very large surge in demand for
some of the highest-end desktop CPUs made, with most of that
demand going to AMD's newest Granite Ridge processors, and even
further, to the X3D versions of those CPUs. This resulted in an
atypical first quarter uptick in AMD's share," McCarron stated in an email.
McCarron also noted that while Mercury Research doesn't typically discuss pricing in its share reporting, it made an exception this round because of the unusual activity.
"This high-end mix
growth also resulted in record desktop and client ASPs for AMD,
and record desktop CPU revenues for the company -- the average
price increase being so large that AMD's revenues were up
substantially and set new records even though desktop unit
shipments declined and are less than half of AMD's peak for the
segment," McCarron added.
The result is that AMD increased its desktop CPU market share to 28%, which is up from 27.1% in the previous quarter and up substantially from 23.9% a year ago. As for the revenue split (calculated by AMD based on Mercury Research's market share data), AMD increased its desktop CPU revenue share to 34.4%, which is up from 28% sequentially and way above 19.2% from a year ago.
It wasn't just the desktop where AMD saw some meaningful gains, the same is true of the server segment. As far as McCarron is concerned, server chip shipments "were definitively the stand-out segment" to start the year, driven in large part by an uptick in demand from hyper-scale customers.
"AMD's growth rate in the quarter was multiples of
Intel's, resulting in significant server share gains. AMD's server
share set a new record high at 27.2% overall, and while not
our official measure of share, on an EPYC v. Xeon SP basis, AMD's
share was also a record at 35.9%," McCarron noted.
Revenue share calculated by AMD based on Mercury Research
Looking at revenue share for server chips (also calculated by AMD), AMD saw a boost to 39.4%, up from 36.4% in the previous quarter and up from 33% a year ago.
Casting somewhat of a cloud over the excellent gains in desktop and server segments, AMD saw a bigger sequential decline in mobile than Intel did, falling from 23.7% to 22.5%. However, AMD's mobile share is still up from last year, when it was sitting at 19.3%.
AMD's share price is up around 2% in early morning trading, possibly due in part to the latest Mercury Research figures. That said, Intel is still in a dominant position even as it works to right the ship, with the Santa Clara chip maker accounting for 72.9% of all x86 processors (down from 74.4% last quarter and 73.9% a year ago), versus 27.1% for AMD.
