[The Exiled]

AMD may regain 30% global desktop CPU market share in 4Q18

After returning to profitability in 2017, AMD has continued gaining momentum to perform better in 2018, with its share price hitting a 12-year high recently and its global desktop processor market share likely to rebound to 30% again in the fourth quarter of the year, thanks to full foundry support from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Intel's delay in launching 10nm processors. AMD has drastically changed its foundry strategy, loosening ties with Globalfoundries and contracting TSMC to fabricate its GPUs, server and PC processors on 7nm process. The policy change has sent AMD share prices rallying all the way since mid-2018 amid market expectations for better chip yield rates and performances as well as normal shipments to customers.

In addition, Intel's failure to carry out process transition from 14nm to 10nm in the second half of 2018 and the ensuing supply shortfall have prompted PC vendors to adopt AMD processors, further pushing up AMD's share prices to new highs in 12 years since late August. Desktop and motherboard vendors including Asustek Computer, Micro-Star International (MSI), Gigabyte Technology and ASRock have ramped up production and shipments of devices fitted with AMD processors, driving up the chipmaker's share of the desktop processor market to over 20% in the third quarter. The company is very likely to see the figure further rebound to the level of 30% again.

In terms of server processor market, AMD's EPYC 7000 series processors have been well adopted by Mellanox and Samsung Electronics since their launch in June 2017, and the firm's expanded EPYC series have also won robust support from heavyweight clients including Microsoft, Baidu, Dell, HP and Supermicro, as well as Taiwan's Inventec, Wistron, Asustek, and Gigabyte. It is expected that the EPYC series sever processors will help AMD win a 5% share of the global x86 server platform market by the end of 2018, which has been 99% controlled by Intel. AMD's latest EPYC processor, codenamed Rome and adopting Zen 2 architecture, is slated for volume production in 2019 using 7nm process at TSMC after the delivery of samplings by the end of 2018.

Izvor: DigiTimes