Intel Vs. AMD

During the Fourth Quarter of 2007, Intel showed the highest increase in its market share by registering a growth of 1.2 percentage points, making it a total of 79.7 percent of the market share. While on the other hand AMD registered a decrease in market share with a downfall of 1.1 percent netted in the Fourth Quarter of 2007 with equivalent market share of just 13 percent. For a long term business in the market, AMD needed to increase the Market share by more than double. This was a review of iSuppli in Fourth Quarter of 2007.

But in the First Quarter of 2008, AMD increased its market share by 2.2 percentage points which has set hopes for the company to survive providing a long term competition to Intel. In the Last Quarter of 2008, Intel Launched its high-end processors, Intel i7 Core family series consisting of i7 Core 920, i7 Core 940 and i7 Core 965. Intel i7 Core 975 is expected to be in the market by mid of 2009. These processors are based on a completely new technology which specifically consists of Intel QPI Hyper Threading that was seen in the Intel Pentium 4 Prescott processors, and the quite famous and very advanced 45 nanometer silicon wafer technology.

AMD is in no state of completing these features in Near Future and so it is rather questionable about the changes in the Fortunes and the Market Share of both the companies. But the advantage AMD has is that these processors are heavily priced and only a few chipsets supports Intel i7 Core, and these chipsets can only support newer technology of RAM i.e. DDR3 making the system ever more expensive.

But retailers want AMD to remain in the Market as it is the only company that can compete with the Processor Manufacturing King Intel. This will bring down the prices of Intel's processors significantly to maintain and increase the market share. Also they do not want Intel to monopolize the processor market for reasons of financial gains and Intel being responsive with their services. It is a proven fact that Intel has always been determined with its prices. So the lower end processor market is still in the hands of AMD, which provides similar configuration at a lower price than Intel.

So AMD has a strategic support from the Retailers and so it is far from being knocked out from the market. These very reasons have also forced DELL to cultivate strategic relationships with AMD despite being responsible for 36 percent of Total Market Share of Intel in 2008. Though AMD is extremely lagging behind in terms of market share as compared to Intel, It has made a grand impact on the overall reduction of Intel's Market Share in 2008 and will probably continue in 2009.

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