We've speculated that Intel's CPU shortage could be significantly good news for AMD and it seems some industry sources share that opinion. There are predictions that AMD could pick up as much as 30 percent of the desktop market by the end of Q4 2018 as Intel's woes continue.
This prediction comes courtesy of DigiTimes(Opens in a new window), which has a somewhat scattered track record where these things are concerned. Supposedly this rebound is due in part to AMD's moving foundry production to TSMC, which makes little sense -- AMD's 7nm chips won't have launched by Q4. The only way for the move to have an impact on AMD market share without 7nm parts available would be if OEMs received AMD's foundry shift as evidence that the company would be more competitive in the future and are therefore more willing to move orders to the smaller CPU manufacturer. The site writes:Desktop and motherboard vendors including Asustek Computer, Micro-Star International (MSI), Gigabyte Technology and ASRock have ramped up production and shipments of devices fitted with AMD processors, driving up the chipmaker's share of the desktop processor market to over 20% in the third quarter. The company is very likely to see the figure further rebound to the level of 30% again.
On the other hand, if AMD is going to see significant gains, this is where we'd expect them to happen. As we recently reviewed, AMD's strongest position across the entire PC industry is in desktops. Its Ryzen Mobile chips have begun to take some market share but the last figures we saw for AMD in this space put it under 5 percent of the mobile market and no real presence in slate PCs.
AMD channel market share based on European retailer Mindshare.de
The desktop market share gains are great for AMD -- any pickup is good for the company -- but ultimately they won't be sufficient to achieve the company's long-term goals. Currently, desktops only account for roughly 20 percent of the PC space. AMD moving from, say, 15 percent to 30 percent of the desktop market would mean moving from ~3 percent of the overall consumer market to ~6 percent. That doesn't exactly sound like much, but appearances can be deceiving. In Q2 2018, AMD reported Computing and Graphics revenue of $1.09B, up 1.64x year-on-year, driven primarily by Ryzen
(Opens in a new window) sales. It's important to keep this in mind when evaluating Ryzen and AMD's overall performance -- while the company may not pick up huge amounts of share in absolute terms, its market had shrunk to the point that even small gains can yield significant financial upside.
DigiTimes is predicting 5 percent server market share for AMD by the end of Q4, which fits with Lisa Su's own mid-single-digit projections for the year and even Intel's comments on the topic. As we swing towards the end of 2018, there's no arguing that AMD is in a much stronger position than it's occupied for at least a decade. The big question now is whether the company can follow up effectively at 7nm. With no Intel 10nm hardware expected until Q4 2019, AMD will have a first-mover advantage and opportunity to demonstrate how effectively it can match or exceed the performance of Intel's Coffee Lake with its own Ryzen 2.
Now Read: If Intel Is Suffering a CPU Shortage, Can AMD Pick Up the Slack?, AMD Lists New, Higher-Power Ryzen Mobile CPUs, and PC Market Could Shrink 5-7 Percent in Q4 2018 Thanks to Intel CPU Shortage
