AMD continues to chip away at rival Intel’s lead in desktop processor market share, with a not-insignificant 5.7% leap in the third quarter of 2024, according to the latest auditing figures by Mercury Research. And compared to a year ago, AMD saw its share of the desktop CPU space increase by nearly 10%, falling less than half a percentage point short of double-digit growth.
As it stands, the figures show AMD managed to increase its share of the desktop CPU market (excluding IoT) to more than a quarter at 28.7%, versus 23% in the previous quarter and 19.2% a year ago. It still has a long way to go in order to catch up with Intel, which saw its share decrease to 71.3%, compared to 77% in the second quarter and 80.8% a year ago.
The numbers do come with a caveat, however.
“Due to inventory being used by OEMs, on a PC systems sell-out basis Intel’s share is no doubt higher than shown for CPUs this quarter,” noted Dean McCarron, President of Mercury Research.
When looking at the overall x86 picture, there was not a whole lot of movement in the third quarter—just around half a percentage point, with AMD settling in at 25% and Intel retaining a commanding lead at 75%. The slight movement did work in AMD’s favor, though compared to last year, Intel increased its share by 5.6%.
The overall snapshot includes all x86 processors, including PC client, servers, IoT, and semi-custom products. From McCarron’s vantage point, Intel’s lower client growth, particular in desktop, held it back. Meanwhile, the impact of AMD’s SoC business isn’t weighing on AMD by the same extent it had been.
“While AMD’s SoC business has been a drag on its sequential all-inclusive share results for several quarters, the size of the declines on a percentage basis is getting much smaller and less impactful on overall results, so AMD’s gains in desktop and mobile aren’t being reduced by SoC headwinds as much as in prior quarters,” McCarron noted.
That’s an interesting nugget, given that it’s late in the cycle of modern generation game consoles (Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5) powered by semi-custom hardware from AMD. Mercury Research didn’t provide numbers for solely SoCs, but if it did, we imagine they would show a precipitous drop compared to last year.