IDC: CPU sales will further decline

IDC released a report about the x86 CPU market in Q4 2008, the research firm found unit shipments declined by 17 percent quarter-over-quarter and by 11.4 percent year-over-year. Market revenue dropped by 18 percent quarter-over-quarter and by 22.2 percent year-over-year to $6.78 billion. For the full year 2008, total processor shipments were up 10 percent, while revenue rose only 0.9 percent to $30.8 billion.

The firm notes the Intel Atom helped to prevent an even bigger downfall in the fourth quarter, without the chip for low-cost computers worldwide CPU sales would have dropped 21.6 percent annually.

In the fourth quarter Intel managed to increase its marketshare by 1.1 percent to 81.9 percent, while AMD lost 0.9 percent to 17.7 percent. Tiny brother VIA Technologies supplied 0.4 percent of the processor market.

The report also split up the marketshare data between desktop PCs, notebooks and servers. These numbers are pretty interesting, in the desktop PC market Intel held 73.9 percent, a gain of 0.4 percent, while AMD dropped 0.4 percent to 26 percent.

In the notebook market Intel is king, the chip giant increased its share by 1.7 percent to 89.1 percent, while AMD dropped 1.2 percent to a measly 10.2 percent. VIA holds about 0.7 percent of the notebook market. Intel is also heavily represented in the server market, the firm gained 2.5 percent to 88.1 percent marketshare while AMD dipped 2.5 percent to 11.9 percent.

IDC says Q4 2008 was bad due to a drop in end system demand and predicts CPU shipments will further decline in both the first and second quarter of this year.