Intel’s market share jumped by 1.2 percentage points compared to the second quarter, with strong sales of notebooks and the popularity of the tablet market helping to increase its lead over rival AMD, who has suffered a share drop of 0.3 percentage points, to 10.2 percent.
Though sales of Intel’s Atom chip, first released in 2008, have decreased in 2011 due to the decline in the netbook market, the company has excelled in the cloud computing market, selling microprocessors to data centres who host the servers. Indeed, the future looks remarkably bright in this sector with demand increasing and estimates of spending in the Cloud to spiral to $110 billion in 2015, up from $23 billion in 2010.
"The boom in media tablet sales has packed both upsides and downsides for Intel-hurting its business in netbook microprocessors-but boosting its sales of chips used in data centers to support cloud computing," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for compute platforms research at IHS.
Intel plans late
assault on mobile market in 2012 with "Medfield" chip
"Because of its broad product line that addresses both the consumer and business side of the microprocessor business, Intel in the third quarter managed to outperform the overall market. Even with the company warning that its fourth-quarter revenue will fall short of expectations, the company still is expected to expand its lead in the global semiconductor market based on its strong performance in the third quarter and the rest of the year."
In its quarterly earnings call, Intel has forecast that it won’t achieve its expected fourth-quarter results, citing HDD shortages caused by the floods in Thailand earlier this year.
Nonetheless, cloud computing continues to grow, the impressive sales of notebooks is expected to continue next year, and the new Atom “Medfield” system-on-a-chip (SoC) is due to launch in 2012 as Intel hopes to muscle in on the lucrative mobile space currently dominated by ARM Holdings.
