Posted on Thursday, April 19 2007 @ 1:00 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
While Intel announces it managed to keep declines in average processor selling prices to a minimum, AMD says it's suffering from significantly lower unit sales and lower average selling prices.
Prices for AMD’s desktop processors fell by an average of about 50%, according to a recent TG Daily analysis . iSuppli told us today that these price cuts were not enough to maintain market shares for AMD. Based on preliminary findings, iSuppli vice president Dale Ford estimates that AMD’s overall market share in the microprocessor industry may have declined 4.7 percentage points from 15.7% in Q4 2006 to 11.0% in Q1 2007. The analyst believes that Intel was able to regain market shares in the same time frame: “On a preliminary basis, I would estimate that Intel increased its market share in microprocessors from 75.7% in Q4 to 79.5% in Q1,” Ford told TG Daily. He described the exchange of market shares as “a big swing” and said that the market share shift was bigger than the firm initially had estimated.
AMD’s Q1 market share loss is somewhat overemphasized in the iSuppli numbers, as they are not limited to the x86 market. However, Intel appears to have come back strong and its dual dual-core microprocessors are scoring big gains, iSuppli said. Intel is also increasing shipments of its quad-core processors – a segment in which AMD cannot compete at this time. Intel expects to have more than one million quad-core processors in the market before the first AMD quad-core will reach its first customers.
