AMD hammers Intel

Intel's x86 growth ends - is this the return of AMD?

AMD has carved a chunk out of Intel's market share over the last few months, according to figures just released by iSuppli.

The numbers show that AMD managed strong chip sales and its share increased by 2.3 percentage points to 12.8 per cent in the first quarter.

Intel's market share slipped 2.5 points to 79.1 per cent in the same period, and iSuppli claims that the decline ended a year of sequential growth for Chipzilla that started in 2008.

Matthew Wilkins, iSuppli principal analyst for compute platforms, wrote that the boost in AMD's sales was due to strong performance in all areas of its microprocessor portfolio, particularly in the notebook segment.

This statement might seem a bit strange as the strongly rising netbook market has been dominated by Intel's Atom chip recently, so we are somewhat surprised that AMD apparently did so well.

According to Wilkins the Atom phenomena is so last year, however. Anyway iSuppli's figures were based on revenues from all types of general-purpose microprocessors, not just the x86 chips used in PCs.