Intel is holding on to market share in both client and server markets against AMD despite the seemingly endless stream of bad news surrounding the company. Second quarter 2025 chip sales were roughly flat for both companies with very little share trading hands, according to Mercury Research.
Most recently Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and President Trump engaged in a war of words with Trump calling for Tan’s resignation. After a meeting this week, Trump was more amicable and called Tan a “success.”
Second quarter 2025 total X86 processor unit shipments grew well above their traditional seasonal rates, which is usually slow for this quarter, primarily due to very strong shipment growth in the IoT/SoC segment, where both AMD and Intel experienced large increases in shipments, the report said.
The conventional server and client CPU markets saw typical seasonal growth, with all segments growing at statistically insignificant amounts above their respective seasonal median growth rates.
“In other words, outside of the IoT/SoC boom, it was a very normal second quarter for the conventional X86 market,” wrote Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury in the report.
Intel’s share of the market minus IoT and SOCs in Q2 was 75.8% vs. 24.2% for AMD. In Q1 it was 75.6% to 24.4%, So we’ve barely moved from 1/4 to the next period however, in Q2 of 2024 Intel had a 78.7% share 2 AMD’s 21.3%, so there has been some slight erosion of the overall market in favor of AMD, but certainly nothing apocalyptic like certain bloggers and broadcasters have been predicting.
Server CPU shipments were “uninteresting,” as he put it, on a sequential basis, with neither supplier seeing much growth on quarter after last quarter’s atypical increase. On-year, the server market was up significantly but that’s because a year ago, the segment was near its cyclical lows and dealing with inventory adjustments.
“Intel was able to sustain volumes in total server unit shipments by moving shipments to non-data center products, such as Xeon D in networking/storage servers, which they noted in their earnings call. That comes at a price; those products have much lower ASPs, so lower revenues, which is why Intel’s DCAI revenues were lower when units were flat,” McCarron told Network World.
“Nothing really moves that fast in servers, and in general a ‘freefall’ can’t really happen outside of some systemic demand collapse event like 2008 was, as the rest of the industry realistically can’t absorb market share at an unlimited rate due to supply chain considerations,” he added.
AMD’s server revenues hit a record high, but most of the revenue gains was from selling a higher mix of its new Turin core CPUs, and unit shipment growth was very modest. However, even with a 0.1-point increase in share, that means a new record high in AMD server sales. It now has 37.2% market share.
Excluding IoT/SoC embedded products from consideration, Intel’s shipments slightly outgrew AMDs in the quarter resulting in Intel having a modest sequential share increase thanks in part to mobile CPU shipments, where Intel has solid products. AMD made a slight gain in desktops, where it is particularly strong.
As for Arm, it showed strength in the server market thanks to Nvidia’s GB200 processors ramping up volumes. On the client side, Apple had slightly higher shipments in the second but that was offset by weakness in Chromebooks.
Source:: Network World