Its CPU market share might grow to 30% thanks to this

Oct 14, 2014 07:20 GMT  ·  By

AMD may have managed to free itself from the “stigma” of being considered just a measuring stone for Intel products, but it's still, ultimately, a provider of central processors, so it will remain in something of a competition with it regardless.

This always becomes obvious when analysts publish their examination results for the central processing unit industry segment.

Though Advanced Micro Devices calls them accelerated processing units, or APUs for short, its many chips are still, in the end, CPUs of a sort.

Sure, they're fancier chips than most, with integrated graphics of mid-range capabilities instead of the paltry low-end IGPs in Intel processors. And AMD still has some pure CPUs for sale (Opteron most importantly).

Nevertheless, the Sunnyvale, California-based company still hasn't reached even 30% of the total market, even though it has been slowly increasing its share. A deal with ASUS may allow it to make that last leap.

The ASUS-AMD collaboration

Technically, AMD has had a partnership with ASUS for a long time, just like it has with Micro-Star International (MSI), ASRock, Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), Gigabyte Technology and Biostar, for years.

However, the partnership with ASUS is supposed to have grown closer recently, or at least is expected to do so in the near future. AMD and ASUS haven't actually come out to announce this, but a report says this is happening.

The deal would see more ASUS laptops and desktop PCs being configured and sold with AMD APUs, chipping away at the share of Intel's CPUs, despite the Haswell Refresh CPU collection.

Since ASUS is one of the world's best known brands for laptops, just like it is for graphics cards and gaming desktop PCs, an agreement on its part to produce and sell more AMD-powered systems definitely has a shot at increasing AMD's CPU share to the desired percentage.

It won't happen immediately, but it might come to pass by 2016, at least on the desktop front.

Based on the findings of some analysts, AMD already holds around 30% of the desktop processor market. Still, the new relationship with ASUS will only increase the share beyond that level if that is the case.

The possible fallout

AMD's relationship with all the other OEMs we mentioned above might suffer if AMD shows ASUS any form of special treatment, leading to a reduction in their AMD-based projects which could offset the benefits of the move entirely. Of course, since ASUS would be showing AMD special treatment instead of the other way around, the concerns are theoretically baseless, but who knows what will happen?