Despite the fact that Intel's Sandy Bridge launch was marred by a design flaw, AMD has received a canning from Intel in the first quarter.

Beancounters at iSuppli said that Intel's global microprocessor revenue share was 82.6 percent, growing from 80.6 percent in last year's first quarter AMD's revenue market share fell to 10.1 percent from 11.8 percent in 2010's first quarter. AMD suffered because of Intel's fast resolution of the Sandy Bridge chipset and flat PC shipments, which in this year's first quarter totalled 81.3 million units, falling by 0.3 percent year on year.

In late January, Intel said it had stopped shipments of the chipset used with its latest generation of Core processors based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture after it found a design flaw. Taking advantage of Intel's woes, AMD at the time launched a marketing campaign called "Ready. Willing. and Stable" to sell more chips. It did not work. Intel moved quickly and resolved the error efficiently, iSuppli said.

AMD's problem was that it did not have a chip to compete with Intel's Sandy Bridge processors. AMD delayed the launch of its latest chips for mainstream PCs code-named Llano, which were due early this year, due to a manufacturing issue. Llano chips were officially announced last month, with laptops and desktops now becoming available. Intel's sheer volume of chip shipments also helped the company gain revenue share over AMD, iSuppli said.