It's the biggest drop in CPU sales in 30 years, according to media reports. That's according to the records of market researchers at Mercury Research. The reason is the slump in the PC market. AMD can increase its market shares in times of crisis.
After the boom comes the slack
In the fourth quarter of 2022, the quantity of x86 CPUs shipped worldwide fell by 34 percent compared to the same period last year. Compared to the third quarter of 2022, the decline was 19 percent. In both cases, it is about the sharpest decline in sales in the last 30 years, the beginning of records at Mercury Research, writes PC Mag.
The reason given is persistently weak demand for PCs, which in turn leads to high inventories at computer suppliers and retailers. There is simply little need to order new processors from AMD and Intel. The reason for the misery is, on the one hand, the normalization of the market after a real PC boom in times of the pandemic. This is now being met by the economic downturn and high inflation rates.
AMD with the upper hand in the crisis
AMD and Intel share the x86 processor market . These are difficult times for both, but despite halving sales of Ryzen CPUs for PCs, AMD was still able to avert a disaster in the latest quarterly figures thanks to the Epyc CPUs for servers and the new branch with the purchased embedded solutions from Xilinx.
At Intel, not only did the PC division collapse, but the Xeon processors for servers also sold very poorly. This resulted in a third less sales and a loss of millions instead of the usual profit of billions.
The fact that AMD has been able to cope better with the times of the PC crisis is now also evident in the market shares. As Reuters reports, Mercury Research determined that AMD had a market share of 31.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022. A year earlier it was 28.5 percent. In return, Intel's share fell to 68.7 percent.
Arm CPUs for PCs
Figures are also collected on the proportion of processors with Arm architecture in PCs, such as those found in Apple Macs and MacBooks. Accordingly, ARM CPUs now have a share of 13.3 percent, which is 3 percentage points more than a year ago. Compared to the third quarter of 2022, when it was still 14.6 percent, it fell somewhat.