AMD chip revenue now smaller than that of Qualcomm and Samsung

Until last year AMD was the company with world's second-largest revenue in the microprocessor market but market research firm IC Insights reports this is no longer the case. Intel remained king with 65.3 percent marketshare in the microprocessor revenue market in 2012, but AMD fell two places in the ranking versus the year before as it now pulls in a mere 6.4 percent of the total revenue in the CPU market. Qualcomm is now the second largest microprocessor maker with a revenue share of 9.4 percent, while Samsung/Apple rank third with 8.2 percent. Curiously, AMD saw its CPU revenue decline 21 percent from 2011 to 2012, but even if the company's sales had remained the same it would still rank fourth in the list.

IC Insights says the microprocessor market was worth $56.5 billion in 2012, a year-over-year increase of 2 percent, a much smaller growth than the 19 percent jump seen from 2010-2011. According to the firm, the market should grow 10 percent this year and achieve $100 billion per year by 2017.

AMD's $3.6 billion was only good enough to put it in fourth place behind Qualcomm and Samsung. Apple's custom SoC orders were included in Samsung's total, and they made up about 83% of the firm's microprocessor revenue last year. Thanks largely to strong iDevice sales, Samsung enjoyed much higher year-over-year revenue growth than anyone else on the list.

Qualcomm and Nvidia also experienced healthy revenue growth. However, Intel and AMD saw their microprocessor revenues decline. Intel's dropped only 1%, but AMD's fell a more substantial 21%. It will be interesting to see how new tablet-focused processors affect the numbers for Intel and AMD in 2013. Sales of those chips will surely contribute to microprocessor shipments, but revenues could still fall due to lower average selling prices. SoCs are cheaper than the traditional desktop and notebook processors they're challenging.