Intel, AMD Push and Pull for X64 Market Share

Published: February 7, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices both had something to celebrate in the fourth quarter, according to market share statistics compiled by Dean McCarron at Mercury Research.

According to McCarron, AMD was able to get 25.3 percent of the overall X86-X64 chip market's shipments in the fourth quarter, thereby taking a slightly bigger piece of the pie and getting the largest market share that the company has ever had in its history. AMD had 23.2 percent of the market in the fourth quarter of 2005, and gained two points of share in a year's time.

But Intel, which dropped to 74.4 percent of the overall X86-X64 market, losing 1.6 points of market share, nonetheless made up for it by gaining market share in the higher-profit X96 and X64 server segment. There are very few new 32-bit X86 servers being made any more, so this is nearly entirely a 64-bit X64 game. McCarron does not give out the market share numbers in the server space for free--this is how he makes a living--but he did describe what happened in the quarter.

"AMD has expanded its customer base, and that has contributed to its general growth," McCarron said. "Intel, on the other hand, gained share in the server segment. The Woodcrest chip was a big part of that, but Clovertown made a big contribution in the quarter, too." Woodcrest is the true dual-core, Xeon 5100 Core architecture processor that Intel launched last summer, and Clovertown is the quasi quad variant of the Xeon 5100, called the Xeon 5300, which puts two Woodcrest chips into a single package where they can share a CPU socket.

McCarron said further that both Intel and AMD have seen a resurgence in their higher-end Xeon MP and Opteron 8000 series products, which go into boxes with four or more processors, too. This has also driven X64 units in the quarter.

According to a statement from AMD citing the Mercury Research figures, such multiprocessor chips accounted for 13.8 percent of total X86 and X64 shipments in the fourth quarter of 2006, and AMD got 64.5 percent of shipments--up from 59.6 percent from the third quarter of 2006. AMD said that in the server space, Intel gained 1.4 points of market share, which it said was not a very big gain considering that Intel was selling Woodcrest, Clovertown, and its dual-core "Tulsa" Xeon MPs at the time. AMD was able to capture 29.1 percent of X86 and X64 processor shipments into desktops and 19.4 percent of shipments into notebooks during the fourth quarter--gaining more than four points of market share in each case.

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