AMD Looked Forward to Returning to Processor Market

Analysts today said that AMD got slaughtered by Intel in the first quarter of the year, but Forbes believes that Llano will help the company to regain market share.

IHS iSuppli said that Intel climbed to a processor market share of 82.6% in Q1 (up 2.0 points from Q1 2010), while AMD dropped to 10.1% from 11.8%.

However, Forbes predicts that AMD’s notebook processors are good enough to take share from Intel – the publication’s forecasts estimates that the uptick could be up to six points in the Laptop AC Adapter market and up to eight points in servers. There may also be gains in the desktop market, but since we know that desktop shipments are declining anyway, those share gains may not matter much.

AMD has fueled high expectations among analysts that its new architecture will generate strong processor shipments. There is now clear pressure for AMD to deliver, even if Intel seems to have fully recovered from its Sandy Bridge hiccup earlier this year.

Intels most feared competitor is ARM.They rule smartphone and tablet market. ARM has multiple suppliers. And they will soon enter the small and light notebook space as well. And eventually the fullsize notebooks will see them too.

For the general public, Intel’s battery itself is too overpowered and the GPU is too underpowered. AMD has found the better balance. I’d still suggest that anyone who spends significant time gaming, who desires top-tier gaming graphics/framerates, or who does CPU intensive tasks such as video encoding, the person should get an Intel CPU. For everyone else, get an AMD one.