Things are looking better now, but is better enough?

Sep 12, 2007 09:46 GMT  ·  By

It seems that Advanced Micro Devices is going in the right direction as the company finally launched their native quad core processors two days ago and already there are a lot of speculations about the increasing number of server manufacturing companies that are going to adopt them as the cores for a new generation of powerful servers. After some months when the general situation of the company alternated between bleak and desperate, AMD is the definitive winner of the processor price war with Intel and because of that the company managed to recover some of its lost market share.

The company's market share increased by a small amount of 2.5 percent which is derived from the increased revenues for the second quarter of the year said the market research firm iSuppli that was cited by the news site tgdaily. According to that market research firm, AMD managed to gain those market points at Intel's expense as the larger processor manufacturer lost 2.1 percent of its market. AMD's increase in market share was the direct result of the ongoing price war with Intel, as the company cut massively all price tags in an effort to stay competitive against the more advanced central processing units that Intel was throwing at the market. As Intel did not reduce its pricing policies significantly, almost all customers interested in a low price and high performance CPU went on AMD's hand.

Because of that situation, AMD's general shipments rose and the higher number of units sold all across the market (mobile, desktop and server), tended to cover the lower average selling prices. isuppli forecasts that the rest of the year will see another series of price adjustments in what the market research firm called an ''aggressive pricing environment''. As both competing companies are preparing to launch yet another generation of processors and related products, prices around the board are expected to drop once more, to the delight of the low and middle end computer markets which are seeing an explosive rate of growth.

As the low end computer is the one most strongly impacted by price fluctuations and because the price policies of the central processing units manufacturing companies are constantly adjusted in order to empty inventories of older products, the low end market is expected to grow by 26 percent in the next few months. Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst at iSuppli's computer platforms research division, said the AMD's performance during this year was impressive as the company reduced the gap between it and Intel and it also managed to take back some of its lost market share, while reducing its financial losses as well.