(Bloomberg) — Intel Corp. ceded more than 2 percentage points of market share to Advanced Micro Devices Inc. in the third quarter, marking another setback for a chip pioneer that has lost some of its technology edge.
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AMD accounted for 24.6% of personal-computer processor sales in the third quarter, up from 22.5% a year earlier, according to Mercury Research. The shift was accelerated by a steep drop in demand for chips used to power low-end notebooks such as the Chromebook, which rely on Intel processors.
Intel still has 75% of the market for PC processors and remains the world’s biggest chipmaker. But AMD has eroded its dominance, especially in the market for higher-end computing.
Intel also is suffering a post-pandemic hangover. When lockdowns and quarantines forced students and office staff to work from home last year, many snapped up Chromebooks with Intel processors. Now that many have gone back to in-person school and work, there’s less demand for those devices.
“The low end of the notebook and Chromebook market evaporated,” Mercury analyst Dean McCarron said in a report.
AMD and Intel are the sole providers of so-called X86 processors, the chips at the heart of the majority of the world’s laptop and desktop computers, as well as most of the server machines that run the internet and corporate networks. AMD has been making steady gains in the market, helped both by new products and delays by Intel in improving its manufacturing.
AMD has limited exposure to the low-end Chromebook market, and it made advances in the most lucrative part of the industry last quarter, seizing more than 10% of the server processor market.
Separately, the portion of the market served by processors made using Arm Ltd. technology also shrank, hurt by the lower Chromebook demand. That decline was offset somewhat by increasing sales from Apple Inc., which has shifted more of its computer offerings to its own chips, based on Arm technology, Mercury said.
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