14 DAY TRIAL // While various branches of the computer manufacturing industry are facing problems like falling prices or critical parts shortage, the demand for computer central processing units is high and rising, translating into good news for the two most important chips in the world, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. According to a report from the Semiconductor Industry Association, SIA for short, the slower summer period did not affect the global trend of increasing the demand for processing units and related products.
While the most important computer chip manufacturer, Intel, registered a slow market share erosion and a slight decrease in shipments, the news site technewsworld cites the computer market research firm iSuppli in reporting that its main competitor, AMD, is slowly but steadily increasing its presence on the global market.
Advanced Micro Devices gained 2.5 percent on the global computer market compared to the situation from the first quarter of the year when the company controlled around 11 percent of the entire market. Now AMD has a stronger presence that is slightly above the 13.4 percent mark while Intel continues to dominate the desktop computer market segment with its massive 78.8 percent share, even after it lost 2 percent of that market during the second quarter.
During this summer, on a global scale, strong sales of computer chips and related products were registered especially in July as the total market figure approaches $20.6 billion, which means an increase over 3.2 percent over the sales reported for the previous month and an increase of 2.2 percent over the ones registered in July 2006.
"Major demand drivers for semiconductors, PCs, mobile phones and other consumer electronic products appear to be growing in line with analysts' projections," explained SIA President George Scalise, who was cited by the news site technewsworld. "Prices climbed slightly in several large segments of the semiconductor market, and price erosion in the memory sector slowed significantly in July as unit shipments grew, contributing to a sequential increase in worldwide chip sales.''
Apart from the strong sales of computer chips, the situation is not looking too good for the rest of the manufacturing industry as average selling prices for random access memories continued to go slowly down and the NAND based flash memory market remained basically flat during this summer.
SIA also noted that while the number of computer central processing units grew by around five percent from June, the average selling prices also jumped by almost three percent and the industry outlook for personal computer systems is looking good as demand is growing at a steady pace.