Kent Tibbils, vice president of marketing at ASI, a Fremont, Calif.-based Intel distributor that also sells AMD products, said while Intel has seen a shift to greater sales of lower-end products, his company has seen the opposite, with the distributor’s wide base of channel partners selling higher-end processors and systems, both for desktops and laptops. Desktop processors, on the other hand, saw a 1 percent increase in average selling price while revenue was down 6 percent. This surge in lower-end products translated into a 15 percent year-over-year decrease in Intel’s average selling price for laptop processors, which grew 30 percent in revenue for the fourth quarter, according to the company’s latest earnings results. “The calls I got the last couple nights gave me a cause for concern, but we’re digging into it and seeing where we stand,” he said. However, Stromquist said, he’s hearing new concern from his ODM partners. “Our volume’s high enough where we’re getting what we need, but not too high where we’re getting short,” he said, adding that fellow members on Intel’s Channel Board of Advisors have been pretty quiet about supply issues recently. “I have no doubt that some of that backlog did get worked off.”Įrik Stromquist, president of CTL, a Portland, Ore.-based Intel partner that sells Chromebooks, which relies on small core processors, said he’s noticed an improvement in CPU supply after telling CRN last fall that he didn’t “see any light at the end of the tunnel.” “If they had more product to sell, they could have sold it,” he said. However, McCarron said, Intel would have likely been able to sell even more small core products if its manufacturing capacity was even higher. Prior to the expansion, Intel had prioritized higher-end processors, like the Core and Xeon families, which created backlogs in demand for laptops and PCs with lower performance requirements. McCarron said Intel’s increased sales of lower-end processors - or “small core” products, as Intel sometimes calls them - corresponds with the chipmaker bringing on new manufacturing capacity in the second half of last year to address CPU shortages in that area.
(The report does include sales from Via, a much smaller chipmaker, but its share in the market rounds to zero in all segments but desktop, McCarron said).
The result is that Intel grew market share for x86 CPUs overall by 0.7 points, bringing it to 78.3 percent. This allowed Intel’s share in laptops to grow 1.2 points to 81 percent against AMD while its desktop share grew 0.8 points to 80.7 percent, according to Mercury Research’s report for the fourth quarter of 2020. Intel’s market share growth was largely due to the chipmaker increasing manufacturing capacity for lower-end processors such as Celeron and Pentium, though growing sales of Core i5 and Core i7 processors also played a role on the desktop side, according to Dean McCarron of Mercury Research, a Prescott, Ariz.-based firm that produces a quarterly x86 CPU market share report based on shipments. After ceding market share to AMD in PCs for several quarters, Intel regained some territory in the fourth quarter last year thanks to improving CPU capacity, even as its x86 rival continued to grow.
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