SEPTEMBER 2020 PCWorld 23AMD’s recent quarter. AMD’s mobile Ryzen
4000 now powers 54 notebooks, and there
are 30 more waiting in the wings, AMD CEO
Lisa Su said.
Meanwhile, AMD’s share of the desktop
X86 PC market is nearly as high, at 19.2
percent. This is the highest share of the
desktop PC market for AMD since the first
quarter of 2014, when AMD was shipping
desktop processors based upon the “Jaguar”
architecture.
In terms of overall share in the X86 client
market, (excluding IoT) AMD stands at 19.7
percent, its highest point since the first
quarter of 2012. AMD’s overall X86 share,
factoring in everything, is 18.3 percent,
according to the Mercury numbers cited by
AMD.
“It was a record quarter of mobile CPU
revenue, but not a record for units—higher
average prices is what made the record
revenues happen,” McCarron wrote in an
email. “Mobile CPUs continued to grow their
share of the market—they now account for
more than 60 percent of all processors sold, a
new record. The desktop CPU market
continues to decline and hit a 24 year low in
terms of units shipped in the second quarter
of 2020.
“AMD gained share in every segment and
in overall CPU shipments due to strong
growth in AMD’s SoC CPUs shipping into
gaming consoles,” McCarron added. “AMD’s
mobile share was a new record high at 19.9
percent. Growth of Ryzen 4000 was
particularly strong this quarter.”INTEL STRUGGLES, BUT
IT’S STILL THE BIG FISH
Based upon the traditional dichotomy of the
PC market, any gains by AMD reflect losses by
Intel, and more data released by Mercury
reflect that. Intel’s notebook PC share, for
example, fell 5.8 percentage points year-
over-year, while its desktop CPU share fell by
2.1 percentage points. Intel’s share of the
notebook PC market is now 80.1 percent,
while its desktop share is 80.7 percent.
Overall, Intel holds 81.7 percent of the
overall X86 market, Mercury said, and 80.3
percent of the client PC X86 market.
Intel’s second-quarter results were
excellent (go.pcworld.com/q2xl); it was just
its outlook, and its manufacturing road map,
that concerned Wall Street. Intel now says
(go.pcworld.com/nwsy) that it can address
the low end of the PC market in addition to
the “many core” processors it initially
prioritized during the quarters when it was
unable to make enough chips.
“We expect our share to improve
throughout the remainder of the year as we
begin to recover unit share in notebooks
utilizing our smaller core products which we
have not been able to fully serve given the
strength of demand for our large-core
products,” Intel chief financial officer George
Davis said during the call.