AMD's Q4 market-share numbers revealed

A NEW SET of AMD numbers just hit the wire. This time around it is Mercury's take on marketshare. The short story is that AMD did do as well as you heard they did in Q4/05, and made some massive gains in marketshare.

Overall, the company went from 17.7% of the x86 market in Q3/05 to 21.4% in Q4 - a whopping 3.7% increase. The reason for the product shortages they so heavily denied was that they were totally sold out. For servers, the corresponding numbers are 12.7 and 16.4, another 3.7% increase, while desktop went from 20.4 to 24.3, a slightly higher 3.9% increase. Mobile, the dim spot of the group went from 12.2 to 15.1, a mere 2.9% marketshare jump.

Overall 2005 numbers, AMD lists them as preliminary, went from 15.8% in 2004 to 18.2%. The gain of an added 2.4% share of the market in a sinlge year is pretty substantial. Remember the market they are talking about is tens of billions of dollars, so each percentage point can represent hundreds of millions of dollars.

The overall numbers mirror what we said at the beginning of the year, AMD owns servers, is solid in desktops, and notebooks are its weak spot. No shocks there. The trend will continue in Q1/06. AMD is already sold out and quite capacity limited, but Q2 looks to be a little weaker. AMD will have more capacity then, the market is seasonally soft, and Intel's self-inflicted wounds will have an external band-aid put on them.

Where does that leave our plucky little somewhat internally paranoid green helmeted silicon peddlers? In pretty good shape, for the first half of the year at least, then comes the terrible trio from Israel, and the games begin anew. µ