It took Apple less than a year to start undoing decades of x86 and Intel dominance in the PC chip market.
The Cupertino-based iMonster provided the boost needed for Arm-compatible chips to take noticeable PC processor market share away from x86, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.
Arm’s market share in PC chips was about eight per cent during Q3 this year, climbing steadily from seven per cent in Q2, and up from only two per cent in Q3 2020, before Arm-compatible M1 Macs went on sale.
Apple is dropping Intel’s x86 chips from Macs in favor of its homegrown Arm-flavored processors. Arm’s market share growth was mostly powered by strong Macs sales, McCarron confirmed.
“Apple transitioned much more quickly than anyone expected,” McCarron said, adding the Arm share numbers also included shipments of Arm processors in Chromebooks.
Apple transitioned much more quickly than anyone expected
Arm’s PC processor market share will continue to expand as consumers upgrade Intel-based Macs to ones with Apple’s chips, McCarron said. That market share growth may level off once the Mac upgrade cycle slows down, but that remains to be seen, he added.
Sales of Chromebooks with Arm chips have slowed, and Windows PC users are not switching over to Arm-based laptops with chips from Qualcomm. The numbers reinforce Apple’s strength as a chipmaker. If Apple becomes a chip-seller – which likely won’t happen – Intel could be in trouble.
In another corner, Intel is being beaten up by rival x86 chip house AMD, which has been taking market share away since Ryzen chips starting appearing in PCs, and Epyc microprocessors in servers, in 2017. It seems AMD was wrong to use that Buster Douglas analogy to advertise the launch of Ryzen.
AMD had a 24.6 per cent x86 processor market share – servers and PCs – in Q3 this year, growing from 22.5 per cent a year ago, according to Mercury. Intel’s share declined to 75.4 per cent in Q3, compared to a 77.6 per cent share in the year-ago quarter.
With Ryzen and Epyc parts, AMD measures up to Intel with a full stack of offerings from entry-level and gaming PCs to servers. Before Ryzen, AMD was mainly competing on the low-end to mid-range with Intel chips such as the Pentium and Core i3.
“It’s not so much they are lagging; AMD went from a modestly competitive to a more significant competitive,” McCarron said.
Facebook, which wants to be known as Meta, recently announced it would use AMD chips in its data centers.
Intel’s newest Alder Lake x86 chips, introduced last month, could slow down market-share loss to AMD. Intel’s general purpose processors are also facing competition from specialized chips like GPUs, FPGAs and custom silicon accelerating more workloads.
During Q3, the CPU product mix for PCs focused more on high-end PCs, which is why chip prices went up. There was no lack of CPU supplies, but the shortage of PC components led chipmakers to focus on matching available parts to more profitable processors.
“That pretty much drives processor suppliers to focus on high-end products, like a Core i9 or i7 versus a Celeron,” McCarron said.
The focus on high-end processors and a corresponding decline in demand for Chromebooks hurt entry-level PC chips in Q3. Chromebooks were popular in the early days of the pandemic as people sought stop-gaps with PC shortages, and that market demand was satisfied in Q2 this year, McCarron said.
During the Chromebook boom, Intel’s Celeron and an AMD non-Zen product code-named Stoney Ridge – the A4-9120C chip – shipped in the millions. It’s hard to determine when demand for Chromebooks will return, McCarron said. ®
source: The Register
