Emerging reports continue to indicate that 2022 has historically been a tough year for hardware sales across the tech industry. Over the course of the year, PC CPU shipments saw their largest quarterly decline, resulting in not one, but two record-breaking shipments. And yet, AMD managed to increase its market share in both cases.
- Global demand decline and Intel’s huge loss in the fourth quarter
The biggest drop in CPU payload since 1994
Mercury Research Group (via Tom’s Hardware) writes that the fourth quarter of 2022 saw the biggest decline in PC processor sales in the past three decades. If you feel that this news is a little familiar to you, it is because the same thing happened in It happened earlier that year Is.
The same market research group reported that Q2 2022 desktop processor sales experienced their biggest year-over-year decline since data began being recorded in 1994. Now, the fourth-quarter and year-over-year declines in Q4 2022 appear to have broken the record. Additionally, third-party data leads Mercury to conclude that 2022 is the biggest downturn in PC CPU history.
Sales have not decreased, there is a problem in supply
Excluding Arm processors, about 374 million CPU units were shipped in 2022, down 21 percent from 2021. The income from the central bank in 2022 reached 65 billion dollars with a 19% decrease. The main reason for the adjustment is inventory, which had a greater impact than the decrease in sales. This means that although shipments fell sharply, it does not necessarily indicate a sharp decline in sales to end users.
Arm’s good days among the survivors
Another important detail is that this reduction in CPU workload has had the biggest impact on x86 processors. Recent reports indicate that Arm processors are gaining market share in the laptop market, indicating that they haven’t taken the same hit that x86 units did last year.
After supply chain shocks coincided with a surge in demand in 2020, tech manufacturers scrambled to increase inventory. This trend eventually led to an oversupply coupled with a drop in demand in 2022, a year that spelled dire financial conditions for nearly everyone in the world.
On the other hand, DRAM revenues last year saw their biggest global decline since the 2008 financial crisis. Desktop GPUs saw their lowest sales since 2005. Companies such as Nvidia and AMD reduced their orders from TSMC. Declining demand for smartphones has caused Samsung and Apple’s quarterly revenue to fall to the lowest level in eight years since 2016.
As some analysts have reported for other sectors, Mercury expects these unfavorable conditions for CPU shipments to continue through the first half of 2023 before turning around in the second half.
The numbers reported by Mercury for the second quarter of 2022 show an increase in market share for AMD, which was repeated in the fourth quarter. From 2021 to 2022, the red team’s share of the x86 CPU market increased from 23% to 30%. Most of these gains were in the server CPU market, although Intel also managed to gain market share in mobile processors.
Related posts:
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- AMD continues to grow, releases Q3 2022 financial report
- Apple’s $90 billion revenue in the final quarter of 2022 and a 47% iPhone share
