The CPU market experienced its most tumultuous quarter in some time, decreasing as a whole for AMD and Intel in terms of unit shipments. As Intel struggles, however, its competitors are seizing opportunity where they can.

Mercury Research released its report for the CPU market for the first quarter of 2025, and behind the numbers are multiple stories to tell. Arm’s market share has finally broken into double digits. AMD, meanwhile, is all over the place: strong in servers, especially strong in desktop PCs, but unexpectedly weak in notebook shipments.

Overall X86 processor units declined, Mercury said. That’s normal for the second quarter, as hardware sales tend to crest in the fall and drop in the spring or summer. (Mercury saves this precise information for its paid clients.)

Total X86 share — including PCs, embedded processors and systems-on-a-chip (SOCs) like game processors, again favors AMD, as it grew 1.5 percentage points to 27.1 percent. Intel holds the remaining 72.9 percent. Subtract embedded and SOC numbers, however, and AMD lost slightly, shrinking 0.3 percentage points to 24.4 percent and leaving Intel with the remainder.

Both AMD and Intel also saw sequential increases in server processors, as well, supporting what seems to be Wall Street’s belief that the more silicon shipped into the enterprise and AI space, the better. Compared to the same quarter last year, server processor unit shipments grew a whopping 20 percent, Mercury found.

Arm continues to surge

And Arm? That’s on the the rise, too, reaching double-digit market share in the client PC market, which includes PCs and Chromebooks. PCs, Chromebooks, and Apple Mac PCs with Arm chips inside them now make up 13.9 percent of the market, up from 10.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2024. It’s the first time Arm has reached double digits in overall share, including servers — that climbed from 9.6 percent in the fourth quarter to 11.9 percent in the first quarter of 2024.

“While Apple’s Mac shipments were lower, we noted a modest increase in ARM CPUs going into Copilot enabled PCs,” Mercury principal analyst Dean McCarron said in an emailed statement. “However, the overall estimate for ARM client was much higher in the quarter primarily to what we believe was a large increase in shipments of processors into Chromebooks.”

Mercury acknowledged, as it has in the past, that it has more difficulty tracking the Chromebook processor market than the major PC vendors. Still, he said, “the increase in ARM Chromebook activity in the past quarter also strongly supports a large increase in ARM CPU shipments into the segment” alongside wins for Intel’s X86-based N-series chips as well.

AMD: up and down, all at once

Intel, of course, has weathered the departure of one CEO, the hiring of another, and layoffs which have stitched together both administrations. Both AMD and Qualcomm have benefited.

The unexpected surge in AMD’s desktop shipments took an unexpected turn. Normally, consumers buy PC processors during holiday sales. But Mercury found that consumers snapped up AMD’s Ryzen 9000 (Granite Ridge) as well as the 9000X3D versions of those CPUs, pushing the selling price of AMD’s desktop (and overall client) to record levels. The average selling price actually exceeded Intel’s ASP for the first time ever, McCarron said.

“The average price increase [was] so large that AMD’s revenues were up substantially and set new records even though desktop unit shipments declined and are less than half of AMD’s peak for the segment,” Mercury’s McCarron wrote.

AMD’s growth in the server space was “multiples” of Intel’s own, McCarron said, setting a new record high at 27.2 percent overall,

AMD, however, couldn’t keep up with the competition in mobile. Though AMD and Intel both declined, Intel’s declines were much smaller than AMD, and so it gained 1.2 percentage points of market share. Mercury attributed that to Intel capitalizing on its traditional success in business PCs, and AMD suffering normal declines. (PC vendors and especially Microsoft have pushed hard for customers to replace their Windows 10 PCs with a Windows 11 machine when Windows 10 support ends this October.)

Qualcomm has yet to launch a desktop CPU, too, meaning that Arm’s influence in the PC market has focused solely on notebook PCs.

However, that drop was partially offset in AMD’s growth in SOCs, which basically equate to the processors found in game consoles. Here, AMD gained 1.5 percentage points.

The one word which didn’t appear in Mercury’s report: tariffs. PC vendors have said previously that the CPU market is one segment that does not suffer from tariffs, as the three top CPU vendors all have their “point of origin” in the United States.

Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld