Intel Atomizes The Competition In 2008

Intel strengthened its dominant position in the global microprocessor market in 2008, breaking the 80 percent threshold in terms of overall market share for the year, according to industry research firm iSuppli.

Intel, which wrapped up the final quarter of 2007 with 78.4 percent of the combined worldwide market for x86, RISC and other general-purpose microprocessors, increased its share of total revenues in the market "in every quarter of 2008 on a sequential basis, effectively using each quarter as a building block for the next," according to Matthew Wilkins, iSuppli's principal analyst for compute platform research.

Wilkins attributed a significant portion of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel's market share gains to sales of its low-priced, low-power Atom processor, which developed into the platform of choice for the increasingly popular netbook category over the course of 2008.

Intel's gains included a full-year increase in market share from 78.9 percent in 2007 to 80.5 percent in 2008, and a year-over-year gain of 3.4 percent in last year's final quarter against the fourth quarter of 2007, from 78.4 percent of the total microprocessor market to 81.8 percent.

Much of Intel's share growth came at the expense of its main x86 rival, Advanced Micro Devices. AMD, headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., accounted for 13.1 percent of overall microprocessor revenues in 2007, but just 12 percent in 2008, a drop of 1.2 percent. Sequentially, AMD lost 1.6 percent of its market share from last year's third quarter to its fourth, while slipping from 14.1 percent in 2007's final quarter to 10.6 percent in last year's, a plunge of 3.5 percent.

All other microprocessor vendors accounted for 7.5 percent of global revenues in 2008, down from 7.9 percent the previous year.

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