AMD continues to claw market share away from Intel in CPU shipments, growing faster than its rival in most segments. Meanwhile business in the x86 processor arena is unusually flat overall, likely due to stockpiling over tariff fears.
PC component market watcher Mercury Research says AMD’s shipments during the third quarter of 2025 outpaced Intel’s compared with the same quarter last year.
The main drivers for these gains were AMD’s strong desktop growth and Intel’s lower volume of shipments into the entry-level mobile CPU segment, the firm said.
In overall share of the x86-based chip market, AMD now accounts for 30.9 percent, an increase of 6 percent on a year ago. However, when semi-custom products like those used in gaming consoles are excluded, AMD’s share stands at 25.6 percent – up just 1.6 percent on the previous year.
Mercury doesn’t disclose the exact figures, but says that weakness in the market was due to lower shipments in the system-on-chip (SoC) and embedded segments, which were well above the seasonal norm during the previous quarter.
It suggests two causes for this – an inventory-related decline, meaning that distributors and manufacturers stockpiled products earlier in the year due to the trade-related uncertainty and economic jitters that have characterized the current US administration.
The other likely cause is Intel’s decline in shipments of entry-level mobile processors, where supply was limited as the company moved manufacturing capacity to other products, such as its next-gen server chips.
Speaking of server chips, AMD saw its share of this segment rise to 27.8 percent during the quarter, which is up 3.5 percentage points on a year ago. The flip side, of course, is that Intel still accounts for over 72 percent of this market.
Both companies benefited from newer server silicon coming through – the “Granite Rapids” Xeon 6 for Intel and “Turin” fifth-generation EPYC parts for AMD – which are more expensive and allowed the pair to enjoy improved server CPU revenue on relatively flat unit shipments, according to Mercury.
For desktops, AMD gained nearly 5 percentage points to 33.6 percent market share, which means that Intel was down by a similar amount but still accounts for about two-thirds of the market.
For mobile CPUs, Intel actually increased its share here, up by just 0.4 percent to 78.1 percent compared with a year ago, although this is down on Q2 of this year.
All this data is for x86 processors. When it comes to Arm, which is trying to muscle in on the PC and server markets, Mercury estimates that chips based on its architecture have a total market share of about 11.6 percent, up from 10.9 percent in the second quarter. ®