iSuppli, the research firm specialized in financial information, has just published its estimates for market shares in the first quarter of 2008. ‘’Others’’ represents VIA and manufacturers of RISC processors and "general-purpose" type CPUs.
While Intel comes close to 80%, we can nevertheless see that AMD is regaining strength. On the other hand, when compared to last quarter the situation is less optimistic for the Sunnyvale firm although we should keep in mind that the Phenom B3 was only announced in the last days of the first quarter.
Overall, the first three months of the year were better than expected with the delivery of 69.9 million CPUs, or an increase of 12.1% compared to the same quarter in 2007. However, given that sales of laptop PC processors increased 30% in the same period, this means that the increase on the desktop was practically nil. More good news for these companies is that average sales prices didn’t decrease compared to the previous quarter, a sign that the price war is over and maybe that there is a lack of competition on the mid-high end.
