Call it a coincidence if you must, but good products always seem to do wonders for AMD’s market share. Quoting an "upcoming report" by Mercury Research, EE Times says the chipmaker’s slice of the PC processor market grew almost four points in the first quarter of this year—a gain likely tied to the debut of the Phenom II line.
In the fourth quarter of 2008, AMD reportedly had a 17% market share to Intel’s 82.1%. But last quarter, Mercury says AMD managed to secure 20.9% of the market—and Intel’s piece of the pie shrunk to 78.2%. Perhaps you shouldn’t take those numbers at face value, however: EE Times quotes Mercury Research’s Dean McCarron as saying, "The quarter was defined by inventory adjustments, so the statistics do not necessarily reflect the actual state of the market or market share."
More specifically, the analyst firm notes that PC processor makers have now cleared "most [if] not all" of the excess inventory they accumulated because of the recession.
Mercury Research isn’t the only one seeing the popularity of AMD’s CPUs increase, either. Bright Side Of News got some insider information from a top-tier motherboard vendor, which claimed to have gone "from 8% AMD 92% Intel to a 70:30 mix with the tendency of going 60:40 in Intel’s favor during Q2." Perhaps these gains will help AMD not lose money every quarter.