According to IDC’s latest report on global chip shipments, Intel’s sales figures were not significantly affected by the Sandy Bridge bug.
Intel accounted for 80.8 percent of all processors shipped in Q1, increasing its share by 0.3 percent sequentially. AMD’s market share went down to 18.9 percent from 19.5. Global processor shipments also dropped by 0.21 percent.
Despite Intel’s massive recall of 6-series motherboards, it would appear that the Sandy Bridge SATA bug did not have much of an impact on total shipment figures. However, Sandy Bridge processors weren’t supposed to account for much of Intel’s sales in Q1 anyway, but the company was planning to aggressively transition to the new architecture throughout 2011. The bug will obviously delay the transition to some extent, but it’s still not clear whether if it will affect sales in Q2.
AMD has apparently failed to capitalize on Intel’s woes. Its next generation mainstream APU codenamed Llano won’t be available for a few months, so Intel has plenty of time to get back on track. Still, Llano will probably end up quite a bit cheaper than Sandy Bridge processors and it should pack quite a bit more graphics muscle.
IDC believes processor shipments will grow by about 10.1 percent in 2011. Analysts also think tablets will start to eat into notebook sales, which won’t bode well for Intel or AMD.
More here.
- Error