BeHardware - News - January 22, 2008

According to figures from IDC, there were record breaking sales of x86 processors in the fourth quarter of 2007. Compared to the third quarter, deliveries rose 8.5% and sales increased 9.6% totaling $8.7 billion.

This can be explained by a 17% increase in deliveries of CPUs for servers, 10.3% in the mobile segment, and also 6.5% on the desktop. One interesting detail is that on each of these three markets, growth is mostly due to the increased sales of high end processors.

In terms of market shares and units sold, Intel progressed slightly to 76.7% taking 0.4% from AMD who was at 23.1%. The Santa Clara giant’s CPUs equip 81.9% of PC laptops, 85.4% of servers and 72.1% of desktops. Given that VIA only had 0.23% of the market for this period, AMD had most of what was left.

For the entire year, the number of CPUs sold increased 12.6% but the average price significantly decreased as total revenue in this sector only grew 1.7%. Intel thus controlled 77.46% of the market or 2.34% more than in 2006. AMD’s share slightly declined to 22.26% or -0.8% less. The 1.14% difference can be explained by VIA’s meager results which went from 1.42% to 0.28%. Note that these figures only reflect sales on the PC market while the Taiwanese manufacturer is focusing more on embedded solutions.