A hoarding outside AMD’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California. Image: AMD

AMD has captured nearly a third of the market for central processing units while British chip technology firm ARM’s rise in the PC market slowed in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to an analyst report.

AMD has grabbed share away from Intel, which still remains the largest player in the market for what are known as x86 processors, which work with popular operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows. In the fourth quarter, Intel had 68.7% market share for x86 processors versus AMD’s 31.3%, which was up from 28.5% a year earlier, according to Mercury Research.

The results came amid what Mercury Research president Dean McCarron said in the report was the worst downturn in the PC chip market since the 1980s and possibly the worst in the industry’s history. After snapping up PCs and laptops for working from home during the pandemic, consumers and businesses have slowed their purchases amid rising inflation and economic uncertainty.

But the slowdown has played out differently for AMD and Intel. AMD last month beat Wall Street sales expectations while Intel conceded that it had “stumbled” in competing with its longtime rival, with Intel’s expected losses forcing broad employee pay cuts.

AMD declined to comment on the analyst report. ARM was not immediately available for comment.

But the PC sales slump has also affected Apple’s Mac computer line-up, which is the leading source of sales for ARM-based PC chips.

Mercury said ARM PC chips, led by Apple’s in-house chips but also joined by Qualcomm’s recent PC chips for Windows machines, now have 13.3% share of the market for PC chips, down from 14.6% a quarter earlier but still up from 10.3% share a year ago.

Read: Intel’s plight signals a changing of the guard in chips

ARM, which is owned by Japan’s Softbank Group, licenses its technology to companies like Apple and Qualcomm to make into PC chips and has made expansion into new markets like PCs a major part of its sales growth strategy ahead of an expected initial public offering later this year. — (c) 2023 Reuters