AMD Continues to Eat Into Intel’s Market Share

AMD continues to push forward with impressive momentum, steadily eating into Intel’s CPU shipment share and outpacing its rival across most major market segments. Yet, despite AMD’s gains, the overall x86 processor market remains surprisingly subdued—likely a result of distributors and manufacturers stockpiling inventory amid tariff concerns.

According to new data from Mercury Research, AMD is on track to surpass Intel in total CPU shipments for the third quarter of 2025 compared with the same period last year. The research firm highlights two key forces behind this shift: AMD’s strong desktop CPU growth and a noticeable decline in Intel’s entry-level mobile processor shipments.

Across the broader x86 market, AMD now holds a 30.9% share, marking a year-over-year increase of 6 percentage points. However, when excluding semi-custom products such as game console chips, AMD’s share stands at 25.6%, edging up just 1.6 points from last year.

Mercury did not disclose detailed figures, but noted that weakened demand was driven by reduced shipments in system-on-chips (SoCs) and embedded processors—two categories that had surged well above normal seasonal levels in the previous quarter. This suggests two likely explanations: inventory drawdowns following earlier stockpiling amid U.S. trade uncertainty, and Intel’s limited supply of low-end mobile CPUs as it reallocates manufacturing capacity to products like its next-generation server chips.

On the server side, AMD continues to extend its footprint. Its market share climbed to 27.8% this quarter, up 3.5 points from a year earlier. Even so, Intel still commands more than 72% of the server CPU market, maintaining a dominant, though slowly shrinking, lead.

Both companies saw revenue benefits from the launch of new high-value server processors—Intel’s Granite Rapids Xeon 6 and AMD’s fifth-generation EPYC “Turin.” While shipment volumes stayed relatively flat, the higher price points of these chips helped lift overall server CPU revenue.

In the desktop category, AMD expanded its share by nearly 5 percentage points, reaching 33.6%. Intel mirrored this shift with a similar decline but still controls roughly two-thirds of the market.

In mobile CPUs, Intel actually posted a slight year-over-year gain, adding 0.4 points to reach a commanding 78.1%, though this remains lower than its Q2 performance.

All of these statistics reflect only the x86 processor landscape. For Arm-based chips—an architecture steadily pushing into both PC and server markets—Mercury estimates their total market share has risen to around 11.6%, up from 10.9% in the previous quarter.