When the number one in microprocessors - Intel - faces fiercer, more effective competition.
As the historic leader in the processor market, Intel is facing ever-increasing competition from all the solutions developed for smartphones, where ARM architecture is the sole contender (100% market share). But even in its favourite sector - that of x86 chips - Intel is no longer so serene, and competition from its "constant companion" (AMD) is increasingly visible. AMD is taking advantage of the situation to regularly publish data compiled by the Mercury Institute, which paints an interesting picture of the market. This report - relayed by Tom's Hardware - can be broken down into three main categories.
First, let's take the case of processors for servers. Here, AMD's rise to prominence came later than in other sectors. Nevertheless, its progress is quite remarkable, with market share now standing at 27.3%, compared with 72.7% for Intel. Intel's dominance is still quite solid, but it's worth pointing out that over the last twelve months, AMD's market share has risen by 3.6 points. The reason for this is the remarkable EPYC processors, which are more economical and more powerful than their Xeon equivalents at Intel... although AMD's increase over the start of 2025 was only 0.1 points. A sign that Intel's latest Xeon releases have found their audience?
The sector in which AMD has longest been competing with Intel is undoubtedly that of desktop processors. These are the processors we use on our "tower" machines in the office or at home. Here, AMD has yet to dominate Intel, which retains the largest market share, but AMD's progress is impressive. Today - in the second quarter of 2025 - we're talking about 32.2% market share for AMD versus "only" 67.8% for Intel. Just think: in 2016, Intel still had over 90% market share! What's more, AMD's progress seems to have accelerated since the launch of the Ryzen 9000 and, compared to the previous quarter, we're talking about an increase of 4.2 points!
The third and final sector to watch for processors is mobile. This time, we're talking about chips used in notebooks and other solutions such as mini-PCs. Here, too, AMD has made great strides up to 2022, increasing its market share from less than 10% to almost 25%. Unfortunately for AMD, the rest was more complicated, and it took many long months to get back (in the fourth quarter of 2024) to almost 24%... before falling back again. At the start of 2025, Intel and its Lunar Lake/Arrow Lake chips seem to have won over the public: in June 2025, AMD still controls 20.6% of the market, but its share is down 1.9 points on the previous quarter.
