AMD holds steady against Intel in Q1

Intel managed to slow the momentum of AMD’s ascent for the first quarter of 2024. But year-over-year, AMD is still growing.

The first quarter is traditionally a slow one for chip sales, coming off the holiday rush. That applies both to clients and servers, but for different reasons. Client CPU sales come from holiday giving, while server CPU sales in the fourth quarter tend to be end-of-the-year spending. People have budgets to spend by the end of the year, so there is often a rush in the fourth quarter for server sales.

For the first quarter of 2024, x86 processor shipments were finally back in line with typical seasonal trends for both client and server processors, according to Mercury Research. This past quarter was the first time since early 2020, when the Covid pandemic began, that market results have been completely normal in the desktop, mobile and server segments, wrote Dean McCarron, principal analyst with Mercury Research.

IoT/SoC processor shipments declined far more than typical, as decreased console demand impacted AMD’s SoC shipments, said AMD CEO Lisa Su in an earnings call with Wall Street analysts. Su noted that the consoles on the market are about five years old, and sales are beginning to slack off.

McCarron said the SOC weakness wasn’t the only thing dragging down AMD; he noted some softness in its mobile processor sales versus Intel as well.

Much of the past year has been spent on inventory correction as chip vendors draw down their excessive CPU inventory and make room for new products. It will be at least two more quarters before a proper comparison of sales can be made.

So, for the quarter, Intel’s share of the x86 market was 73.9%, a slight bump from the 71.4% in Q4 of 2023 and a considerable rise from 65.4% in Q1 of 2023. AMD’s share was 26.1%, down 20.6% sequentially and 34.6% year-over-year.

Again, this is attributable to weakness in the gaming console industry. Intel makes a SOC chip that is used in both the Sony PlayStation and Apple Xbox – which is rather ironic, because those sales were what kept AMD afloat several years ago before its revival.

When you take out the SOC and IoT businesses, there is a slight change in favor of AMD. For Q1 of 2004, Intel held a 79.2% share to AMD’s 20.8%. In the prior quarter, it was 79.6% to 20.4%, reflecting no substantive change from one quarter to the next. A year prior, it was 82.8% versus 17.2%, so AMD’s gains came earlier in the year.

In the server field, things were pretty much unchanged sequentially, with Intel holding a 76.4% share to AMD’s 23.6%. In the prior quarter, it was 76.9% to 23.1%. But for the year prior, it was 82% versus 18%, reflecting a positive reception of the fourth-generation Epyc server processors, launched in November 2022.

McCarron wrote that server CPU sales took a pretty hard hit in 2023, and Q4 is the only quarter to show sequential growth. He said that judging by the talk on the earnings call, it is apparent that Genoa is the main driver of on-year growth for AMD.

McCarron also noted that AMD shipped its MI300A Instinct processor, which is a hybrid CPU GPU accelerator, in the first quarter. Had these units been counted as CPUs, AMD’s on-quarter share would have been higher.