CPU Market Experiences Intel-AMD Stalemate

As end-users know, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are constantly at odds with each other on the CPU market, and it seems neither managed to wrest any noteworthy part of the other's market share during the third quarter of 2010.

Intel may more or less dominate the CPU market, but AMD has been holding onto its own share for years now, both sometimes losing or gaining some of it.

During the third quarter of the ongoing year, however, it seems that neither of the two was able to grow at the expense of the other.

Of course, this also implies that neither suffered any market share loss because of the rival, at least this is what iSuppli has found.

Basically, Intel held 80.1 percent of the global microprocessor revenue, while Advanced Micro Devices ended the July-September period with 11.3 percent.

On-year, this means drops of 0.1% and 0.8% , respectively, while the quarterly evolution was of down 0.3% and 0.2%, respectively.

“In reality, the share changes in the third quarter from the two incumbents were extremely small and not at all significant,” said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for compute platforms at iSuppli.

“What is significant, however, is that neither company has been able to take any sizable share away from the other,” he added.

“One reason is that each company offers well-matched competitive product portfolios. Another reason is that end markets are not undergoing significant changes in market share of product lineup that would impact microprocessor market share,” he went on to saying.

“There remains a very competitive situation between the two dominant suppliers. In particular, we look forward to seeing the effect that AMD’s forthcoming Fusion products might have on the share situation for these two mega-players.”

On the upside, while the market shares did hold for both rivals, the overall microprocessor revenues at least grew by 23% compared to Q3 of 2009 and by 3 % over Q2, 2010.