PC chip shipments sink, Intel share up
Worldwide PC processor shipments fell sharply in the fourth quarter of 2008, though Intel's Atom chip bucked the trend, according to new data from IDC.
In the fourth quarter, processor unit shipments declined 17 percent quarter over quarter and 11.4 percent year over year, while market revenue declined 18 percent over the previous quarter and 22.2 percent compared to the year-earlier period to $6.78 billion, IDC said.
"The decline in PC processor unit shipments in the fourth quarter was the worst sequential decline since IDC started tracking processor shipments in 1996," said Shane Rau, a chip analyst at IDC.
(Credit:
IDC)
For the full year, total PC processor unit shipments grew 10 percent, while revenue grew 0.9 percent to $30.8 billion.
Intel's Atom processor is proving to be recession-proof. The popular Netbook chip prevented overall unit decline percentages from going above 20 percent. Without Atom, worldwide PC processor unit shipments would have been significantly worse: declining 21.7 percent quarter over quarter and 21.6 percent year over year, IDC said.
Intel grabbed an 81.9 percent unit market share in the fourth quarter, up 1.1 percentage points over the previous quarter. AMD fell to 17.7 percent, a loss of less than 1 percentage point. For the full year, Intel had an 80.3 percent unit market share, a gain of nearly 3 percentage points, while AMD's share dropped to 19.2 percent, a loss of 3.1 percentage points.
In 2008, Intel gained 4.8 percentage points in mobile PC processor market share, garnering 87.1 percent of the market. AMD finished with a 12.1 percent share of the mobile PC processor market, a loss of 5.3 percentage points.
Looking ahead, IDC said demand remains so weak that it expects sequential processor unit shipment to decline in both the first and second quarters of 2009.
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
- by pithenumber February 11, 2009 2:54 PM PST
- bad news for AMD, there light at the end of the tunnel though, the Radeon 4900's on 40nm will come out before the nVidia's 40nm chips (I think)<br />@77dust<br />Neo isn't competing in netbook, its competing against the ultra low end C2D's
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