Intel, AMD remain leaders in global microprocessor industry

While Intel finished the year on top with an 81% share of global microprocessor revenue, up 0.4% from 80.6% in 2009, AMD ended 2010 with an 11.4% share, down 0.8 points from 12.2% in 2009, keeping it in second place. "The year 2010 was a period of major transitions in the microprocessor market, with suppliers facing a raft of changes, ranging from the new competitive threat posed by media tablets to the technology revolution spurred by the rise of graphics enabled microprocessors," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst, compute platforms, IHS. "Despite these developments, the competitive state of affairs remained very much the same two horse race it has been for more than 20 years, with Intel firmly in the lead and AMD a distant second." While the static market share situation is emblematic of the mature conditions in the pc segment of the microprocessor industry, Wilkins maintained that the competitive situation remained intense in 2010, with the two companies fighting for every dollar possible from original equipment manufacturers. "The microprocessor market traditionally has been dominated by sales of Intel and AMD X86 products to the pc market," noted the analyst. "However, the year 2010 was marked by the rise of a new platform: the media tablet, led by Apple's iPad - which employed a non-X86 device at its heart designed by Apple and manufactured by Samsung Electronics." IHS believes unit shipments of media tablets soared to 17.4million in 2010, up from zero in 2009, with levels expected to grow to more than 240m units in 2015. As a result, the analyst predicts semiconductor revenue from this market segment to represent a significant opportunity not just for suppliers such as Samsung, which is already present in the fledgling tablet market, but also for pc processor incumbents AMD and Intel.