AMD holds steady against Intel in Q1

So, for the quarter, Intel’s share of the x86 market was 73.9%, a slight bump from the 71.4% in Q4 of 2023 and a considerable rise from 65.4% in Q1 of 2023. AMD’s share was 26.1%, down 20.6% sequentially and 34.6% year-over-year.

Again, this is attributable to weakness in the gaming console industry. Intel makes a SOC chip that is used in both the Sony PlayStation and Apple Xbox – which is rather ironic, because those sales were what kept AMD afloat several years ago before its revival.

When you take out the SOC and IoT businesses, there is a slight change in favor of AMD. For Q1 of 2004, Intel held a 79.2% share to AMD’s 20.8%. In the prior quarter, it was 79.6% to 20.4%, reflecting no substantive change from one quarter to the next. A year prior, it was 82.8% versus 17.2%, so AMD’s gains came earlier in the year.

In the server field, things were pretty much unchanged sequentially, with Intel holding a 76.4% share to AMD’s 23.6%. In the prior quarter, it was 76.9% to 23.1%. But for the year prior, it was 82% versus 18%, reflecting a positive reception of the fourth-generation Epyc server processors, launched in November 2022.

McCarron wrote that server CPU sales took a pretty hard hit in 2023, and Q4 is the only quarter to show sequential growth. He said that judging by the talk on the earnings call, it is apparent that Genoa is the main driver of on-year growth for AMD.

McCarron also noted that AMD shipped its MI300A Instinct processor, which is a hybrid CPU GPU accelerator, in the first quarter. Had these units been counted as CPUs, AMD’s on-quarter share would have been higher.