“The corrections were largely resolved by the third quarter of 2023, so current-quarter share results are probably in line with actual CPU sell-in, and by the third quarter of 2024 most comparisons should be valid – but the on-year results certainly aren’t,” he wrote in his report.
“After a year of inventory burn, the current quarter results probably are more reflective of actual demand and market share, rather than inventory changes – there’s not as much inventory left around to suppress Intel’s sales, so what we’re seeing is what the CPU customers are really buying, and for Intel they’re buying fewer units than what it was a year ago, and for AMD they’re buying more,” he added via email.
And there is some interesting nuance in the Intel decline. As the market has shifted to higher core count chips – up to 64 cores in one CPU – fewer chips are being sold. A two-socket server with 32-core chips can do the work of four 16-core chips, which translates into fewer servers. It seems enterprises would rather have fewer physical servers with high core counts than many physical servers with low core counts.
“Intel, which has the majority share and thus the highest volume of lower-core-count units, had more to lose from a unit shipment perspective as the market converts than AMD does – AMD is essentially growing with the high core count movement, and while Intel’s new products are as well, it’s losing older products and it’s not a 1:1 replacement so the migration to high core count is more unit and market share negative to Intel than it is to AMD,” he said.
Just another bit of bad news for Intel, which has had a lot lately.
