IDC: PC processor sales stagnant in the 2nd quarter

Research group IDC has reported that while the slowdown in computer sales in numerous regions had led to PC processors sales stagnating, earnings are still up 5.4% over a year ago.

Not surprisingly, sales of PC processors stagnated during the second quarter of 2011, growing only 0.6% over a year ago and down 2.9% when compared to the first quarter of 2011. The first quarter was exceptional as there was also a slight seasonal aberration in the fact that there was an additional calendar week, according to research group IDC.

At the same time, the market did manage to increase earnings 5.4% over a year ago, with revenue worth 9.49 billion dollars. This is down 4% compared to the first quarter of 2011 (for the same reasons), although if we remove this additional week the results would have shown a small increase over the previous quarter.

The second quarter of 2011 also saw the launch of new hardware platforms – Intel’s Sandy Bridge and AMD’s Fusion, with both of these offering GPU + CPU integration on the same platform. Such releases saw this market category account for 60% of processors sold in the last quarter.


Evenly balanced between Intel and AMD
Intel saw their market share drop to 79.3% this quarter, while AMD took up Intel’s loses to occupy 20.4% of the market. Via Technologies was then a long way behind with 0.3% market share. By category, Intel still largely dominates the mobile PC market with 84.4% market share, while AMB controls 15.2%.

For servers and workstations, Intel controlled 94.5%, while AMD was down slightly to 5.5%. Finally, on desktop computers, Intel had 70/9% market share, down 1.5%, while AMD was up 1.5% to 28.9% market share.

Over the whole year of 2011, IDC has lowered their growth forecasts of all processor categories, believing that growth will come in at 9.3%, instead of the initially forecast 10.3%.