Intel retakes some CPU market share from AMD as CPU shipments tick upwards

Intel Core i9 13900K Raptor Lake chip on a promotional box

(Image credit: Intel)

There's some new cause for optimism in the struggling CPU market. Just last week I wrote about a hopeful rebound following the release of data by Jon Peddie Research. Now new figures from Mercury Research further point to signs of a market recovery in the second quarter of 2023.

According to Mercury Research (via Venture Beat), Intel gained three percentage points of market share, coinciding with a three percentage point drop for AMD. This includes all CPU shipments, including IoT, SoCs and the custom chips found inside consoles. Overall, Intel still leads strongly, with 68.4% of the overall x86 market share, compared to AMD's 31.6% share. If SoC and IoT shipments are excluded, Intel leads by a whopping 82.6% to AMD's 17.4%.

Mercury Research Q2 CPU market share table — (Image credit: Mercury Research)

A large part of the recent CPU market woes are a result of excess inventory. When you have warehouses full of the things, you don't need to make as many. Mercury Research president Dean McCarron says the inventory induced downturn is "probably a thing of the past".

Shipments of AMD's console chips were forecast to decline, as the console shortage faded away, and expected seasonal buying patterns caused a drop in demand. However, it experienced a small gain in mobile and desktop share, but not enough to overcome the drop in console chip shipments.

Intel's growth in market share can be partly attributed to strong growth in the entry level mobile CPU market, driven by Chromebook sales. Sales of entry level 13th Gen processors have also contributed to overall client CPU sales, which grew by over 20% for the quarter.

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Though we usually skip over server news, for interest's sake, AMD saw a slight uptick in server share while Intel dropped a little.

Now that the second quarter is behind us, the third and fourth quarters are shaping up to be very interesting. Once that data lands, we'll know if this second quarter improvement was the beginning of a recovery in the PC market, or just a blip on the downhill path of a steeper decline.

The rest of the year is looking good from the consumer side, with peak trading days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday to come. There's also Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh and Meteor Lake families to look forward to, and hopefully more laptops with AMD's impressive notebook chips.

The PC market ain't dead yet folks.

Chris' gaming experiences go back to the mid-nineties when he conned his parents into buying an 'educational PC' that was conveniently overpowered to play Doom and Tie Fighter. He developed a love of extreme overclocking that destroyed his savings despite the cheaper hardware on offer via his job at a PC store. To afford more LN2 he began moonlighting as a reviewer for VR-Zone before jumping the fence to work for MSI Australia. Since then, he's gone back to journalism, enthusiastically reviewing the latest and greatest components for PC & Tech Authority, PC Powerplay and currently Australian Personal Computer magazine and PC Gamer. Chris still puts far too many hours into Borderlands 3, always striving to become a more efficient killer.