AMD's desktop CPU market share climbs almost 10% from last year, according to research, but it still trails behind Intel in every sector

PC market sleuths Mercury Research and Jon Peddie Research have both announced their latest judgments in the never-ending battle between AMD and Intel, as to which one is selling the most processors. Focusing on x86 chips for desktop, mobile, and server platforms, the findings claim that it's all going very well for Team Red, but it's still Team Blue that rules the roost for now.

Starting with Mercury Research's report, sent to us directly, it suggests that in the last three months of 2025, AMD had a 29.2% share of the x86 CPU market (not including embedded or IoT processors). With Intel obviously taking up all the rest, that might not sound like great news for AMD, but it is 4.5% better than the same period in 2024.

More specifically, AMD's share of the desktop chip market has risen by 9.5% to a little over 36% of the whole market, though mobile and server sectors have only climbed by 2.2% and 3.1%, respectively. That's better than the figures going the other way, of course, and Mercury Research notes that AMD's Epyc server CPUs are actually selling very well.

"Server CPU shipments saw good growth in the newest products, with AMD reporting its fifth-generation Epyc (code-named Turin) server CPU accounted for more than 50 percent of server revenues for the first time."

As to why Intel's share figures have declined, Mercury Research explains: "The company intentionally reallocated manufacturing to server CPUs earlier in the year, which negatively impacted their ability to build and sell processors for PCs."

"Intel's capacity reallocation hit the company's mobile client CPU shipments the hardest, resulting in Intel experiencing significant sequential and on-year declines in shipments, far below seasonal norms in what is typically an up quarter."

However, while Mercury Research suggests that "x86 processor unit shipments declined sequentially, which is unusual as the fourth quarter typically has the highest sequential total unit growth of the year," Jon Peddie Research's figures paint a slightly different picture, claiming that "the global client CPU market expanded for four quarters in a row, and in Q4’25, it showed modest growth of 2.7% from last quarter."

"We think the PC CPUs’ growth was in line with seasonal buying behavior, albeit a bit low. The influence of the up-again, down-again tariffs, and Microsoft’s withdrawal from support of the 2016 Windows 10, also had an effect," said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.

JPR does agree that sales of server chips have been especially good: "The overall server CPU market increased by 6.5% quarter to quarter and by 13.6% year to year." No prizes for guessing which tech industry is buying all those AMD Epyc and Intel Xeon processors.

As to how things are going to fare over the next few months, Mercury Research doesn't offer anything, and JPR merely says that "We expect Q1’26 to be down due to memory constraints and higher process."

Both AMD and Intel are expected to launch new desktop processors at some point in 2026 (Zen 6, Nova Lake), but with DRAM prices and availability both looking extremely grim for the foreseeable future, there probably won't be any significant change in market shares, just a general decline in chip shipments until the global memory supply chain improves.