AMD Reports Q2 2019 Market Share as Intel Sticks to Its Guns on Pricin

Over the past month, AMD let fly with two-thirds of its 7nm product lineup. Both the desktop and server spaces have now been refreshed with 7nm CPUs. Intel’s response? Meh.

Let’s do the market share data first. Heading into Q2, AMD has a series of pushes and drags on its market performance. Positive factors include Intel’s ongoing CPU shortage (expected to peak in Q2 2019) and the strong overall market response to Ryzen in desktop, laptop, and server. Negative factors include ongoing trade disputes with China and the possibility of a 12/14nm sales slowdown as the 7nm launch approached.

Data on AMD’s market share in desktop, server, and laptops was provided by Dean McCarron of Mercury Research via THG. We’ve covered Mercury Research’s figures before — sticking with one firm allows us to create an apples-to-apples comparison for how AMD’s market share is evolving over time. There’s good news on multiple fronts for the smaller CPU manufacturer:

Notebook share is the major winner, both year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter. AMD has picked up two percentage points of share since the beginning of the year and grown its market share by 1.6x relative to Q2 2018. The challenge for the company will be keeping that share as Intel’s CPU shortage lessens. Some analysts have predicted that AMD would lose its gains in this area as Intel shipped more cores; we’ll see what Q3 shows us in that regard.

The server market continues to tick upwards, with AMD claiming 3.4 percent of the space now, up from 1.4 percent the previous year. AMD didn’t hit its previous goal of taking 5 percent of the entire server market by Q4 2018 (the company told us earlier this year that it believed it had secured at least 5 percent of the 2S / dual-socket server space). We’re not concerned by the relatively slow server ramp — the Epyc CPUs AMD just launched are the most impressive performance leap the company has ever delivered in that market.

Overall, AMD’s market share figures show a company executing well and gaining share. AMD has predicted that its Compute and Graphics revenue will increase by 1.2x over 2018 when the impact of slowing semi-custom design sales is taken into effect (Xbox One and PS4 sales are falling as the new console cycle builds momentum).

As for Intel, the larger CPU vendor is sticking to its guns. Intel’s August CPU Price List gives the expected list prices in 1K units for its complete product lineup. There are no changes whatsoever. These official price guides don’t necessarily reflect the price that chips are selling for in the retail channel, and they certainly don’t reflect the price that OEMs pay in bulk, but they represent Intel’s officially communicated pricing.

The full document is available for your perusal, but it looks like the above straight down the line. Intel may adjust its pricing quietly behind the scenes, or it may make larger, formal cuts at a later date, but the firm is sticking to its guns for now. From Intel’s perspective, this makes good sense. AMD may have just launched an impressive suite of products, but Intel presumably wants to see how the market responds to them before it makes a determination about what to do.

Intel’s response to AMD since 2017 has been to avoid direct price cuts and instead introduce different products at adjusted price points. That might not work in server, given that Cascade Lake has already launched and there aren’t going to be opportunities to respond to AMD with a new family deployment in the near term. Intel might cut prices later this year, or opt to wait to change its product alignments until Cooper Lake or Ice Lake are ready to ship. For now, AMD continues to gain market share with expected improvements in the back half of 2019 related to the 7nm Ryzen refresh.

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