14 DAY TRIAL // According to a recent market report released by research firm IDC, the PC processor market has fallen considerably in the fourth quarter of 2008, a market trend that is expected to continue thorough the ongoing first quarter of this year. As a consequence of the poor market results in the PC processor segment, IDC points to a very grim outlook for the first half of this year.
“The decline in PC processor unit shipments in the fourth quarter was the worst sequential decline since IDC started tracking processor shipments in 1996,” said Shane Rau, director of Semiconductors: Personal Computing research at IDC. “After hinting at a decline last September, the market fell of a cliff in October and November.”
During the fourth quarter of last year, the PC processor unit shipments fell 17 percent sequentially and 11.4 percent by comparison with the fourth quarter of 2007. The revenue fell 18 percent sequentially and 22 percent year-over-year to $6.78 billion, according to IDC's report.
IDC has also reported that for the fourth quarter of 2008, the Santa Clara California-based Intel earned 81.9% unit market share, with a gain of 1.1%, while its main competitor, the Sunnyvale, California-based AMD, earned just 17.7%, which represents a loss of -0.9%. VIA Technologies is reported to have earned 0.4%.
According to the figures delivered by IDC, the global leading CPU maker Intel has continued to gain market share, amid a worldwide decrease in PC processor demand. On the other side, rival AMD has seen a drop in processor unit shipments, which has further increased the gap between the company and its archrival, Intel.
IDC said that one of the main reasons for the slow market results in the PC processor market segment was represented by the “precipitous drop in end system demand that quickly moved up the PC supply chain through OEMs and contract manufacturers to the processor vendors.”