All of AMD's hard won market share gains in 2006 have been wiped out. According to a report from Mercury Research, an Intel resurgence in the first quarter of this year has completely reversed the impressive recent progress made by AMD .
For AMD, it's just the latest in a long line of bad news stories involving its Q1 2007 performance.
At the end of last year, AMD had secured 25 per cent of the overall market for x86 PC processors. The Mercury Research reports says that figure fell to just 19 per cent in the first quarter of 2007. During the same period Intel's market share ballooned from 74 per cent to fully 81 per cent of global x86 chip sales. Quarter-on-quarter, AMD lost share in all segments of the market, including mobile, desktop and server platforms.
Intel 's spectacular turn around is thought to be a function of the impressive performance of its new Core 2 Duo range of CPUs as well as an aggressive pricing strategy.
AMD responded earlier this year with its own round of deep price cuts. However, further strategic errors, including oversupplying manufacturers like Dell at the expense of its traditional relationships with retail outlet, have prevented AMD from recovering.
"We made a strategic risk on how we shifted our capacity to serve our customers. Unfortunately, some were not able to meet those very aggressive growth areas, so we were not able to recover as fast this quarter as we would have liked," AMD CEO Hector Ruiz said in early March.
At as press event in Tunisia yesterday, AMD candidly admitted that the company had its "arse kicked" in recent months and outlined plans to recover including the launch of it new Barcelona quad-core processor.
