Quote:The Mercury Research CPU market share results are in for the fourth quarter of 2020, with the headline news being that Intel has clawed back share from AMD in the desktop PC market for the first time in three years. Intel also stopped its slide in the notebook PC segment, gaining share for as far as our records go back (2018). AMD also lost share in the overall x86 market during the quarter, but notched a solid gain for the year. Meanwhile, AMD continued to make its steady gains in the server market.

It's noteworthy that the fourth quarter of 2020 was anything but typical: The PC market continued its pandemic-fueled surge, seeing its largest growth in a decade. For example, while AMD lost share in the overall x86 market (less IoT) during the quarter, Mercury Research pegs the overall x86 market growth rate at an explosive 20.1%.

Intel obviously captured more of that growth than AMD, but it's important to remember that losing a slight bit of share in the midst of an explosive growth environment doesn't equate to declining sales - AMD grew its processor revenue by 50% last year and posted record financial results for the year.

Shortages have plagued AMD due to ongoing supply chain issues. Given the lack of AMD products on shelves, the company is obviously selling all of the silicon it can punch out, signaling strong demand. AMD expects to see 'tightness' throughout the first half of 2021 until added production capacity comes online, meaning we could see a limited supply of AMD's PC and console chips until the middle of the year.

Those shortages led to a scarcity of AMD's chips during the critical holiday shopping season in the fourth quarter, while Intel's chips were widely available and often selling at a discount. That obviously helped Intel recoup some share. During its recent earnings call, Intel also cited improving supply of lower-end processors, like those destined for Chromebooks, as a contributing factor. Intel CEO Bob Swan noted the company increased its PC CPU units by 33% during the fourth quarter.

Intel has also expanded its chip production by leaps and bounds over the last several years as it recovered from its own shortage of production capacity. The advantages of its IDM model are on clear display during the pandemic - the company's tight control of its supply chain and production facilities have allowed it to better weather disruptions.

That said, given the dynamic nature of the market, it's hard to draw firm conclusions on several of the categories below without more information. Dean McCarron of Mercury Research will provide us with detailed breakdowns for each segment in the morning, and we'll add his analysis as soon as it is available. For now, here's our analysis of the raw numbers.

Quote:During last week’s Q4 2020 conference call, Lisa Su spoke directly to the constraint problem:

Quote:We saw a strong revenue ramp in our business as well as across some of our peers. It’s fair to say that the overall demand exceeded our planning. And as a result, we did have some supply constraints as we ended the year. Those were primarily, I would say, in the PC market, the low end of the PC market and in the gaming markets.

While there’s a little ambiguity in her phrasing, I read Su’s statement as applying to the general PC market, the low-end of the PC market specifically, and to gaming on both console and PC. RDNA, RDNA2, and both consoles would all be part of “gaming markets.” The one market she doesn’t mention is servers, and server is where AMD picked up 0.5 percent additional share.

Intel likely regained share in desktop and mobile partly because AMD opted to emphasize Epyc shipments in a supply-constrained environment. It would be surprising if Microsoft and Sony didn’t have agreements with AMD requiring the CPU designer to make every effort possible to deliver their own SoCs, and AMD is aggressively trying to build its server market share.

This year, we’ll see Ice Lake SP go up against AMD’s next-generation Milan servers. Milan is expected to deliver the 1.19x IPC uplift AMD picked up from Zen 3, while Ice Lake-SP will offer a similar-sized IPC upgrade to Xeon processors. Intel will finally get the benefit of a die shrink for this comparison, while AMD’s Milan, like Rome, is built on a 7nm process.

In mobile, it’ll be Ryzen 5000 and 4000 against Tiger Lake now, with Alder Lake and its hybrid CPU configuration dropping late this year. AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series will hold down the desktop, even though these parts technically launched in 2019. Rocket Lake, Intel’s ICL backport to 14nm, drops in late March. This will be an interesting year for CPU comparisons: Intel will introduce 10nm servers for the first time, debut a new microarchitecture on the desktop for the first time in over five years, and launch its first hybrid CPUs for mainstream power envelopes and workloads.