PC Processor Shipments Has Seen Its Worst Decline In 30 Years

PC Processor Shipments Has Seen Its Worst Decline In 30 Years

Weak consumer demands and inventory correction contributed to low sales, according to Mercury Research.

Since 2020, the pandemic has seen PC sales boom in pretty significant ways, as work-from-home become mostly a mandate due to lockdowns and various restrictions in place. Three years later, the world has moved on – and the so has the PC sales. The after-effect of pandemic-era sales has seen consumer demands reduced greatly, per a report from Mercury Research.

In the report, x86 market has been the worst-hit among all, which experienced “the largest on-quarter and on-year declines in our 30-year history.” Dean McCarron of Mercury Research thinks it’s likely that the numbers of Q4 2022 and the year as a whole may be the worst decline ever seen in PC processor history.

All in all, the total CPU shipment (excluding ARM processors i.e. Qualcomm 8cx series or Apple M-series) is 374 million – down -21% from 2021. Revenue was also down by -19% year-over-year, at $65 billion. While that is a significant drop, it’s still higher than all pre-Covid figures, McCarron says.

AMD is the big winner – with nearly 30% market share overall by the end of 2022, a big jump from 23.3% in the year prior. Most of that comes from server sales, as AMD’s EPYC continues to dominate against Intel’s incompetitive datacenter offerings.

However, it’s not just the low sales that’s causing the decline, McCarron says. A big part of that comes from ‘inventory correction’ – which is to say shipments are deliberately limited to reduce the impact of market oversupply situation. The analyst further notes that this phenomenon will continue for the better part of 2023, and things should get better in the second half of the year.

Source: Tom’s Hardware

Pokdepinion: That’s quite a huge jump in server market share for AMD, I’m surprised.