AMD Grabs One-Fourth Of Server Market, Gartner Says

Advanced Micro Devices saw a healthy jump in server processor market share in the first quarter, according to numbers released by Gartner this week.

Gartner reported that AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif., now holds 25.7 percent of the U.S. x86 server market. That's up from 9 percent in the same quarter one-year ago and 14.9 percent in the fourth quarter.

Jeffrey Hewitt, a research director at Gartner, said AMD has seen its most dramatic increases in the United States. "AMD has a greater vendor network in the U.S. as well as end users buying AMD-based servers."

AMD currently holds 15.3 percent of the worldwide server share.

Hewitt believes part of the jump in U.S. numbers may be attributed to Google, an Intel user that has also been using Opteron based servers in its data center, according to published reports. Hewitt said he believes Google is building its own servers and buying processors directly from AMD.

Hewitt also noted that AMD has a strong share of the four-way server market. The chip maker now claims 48.1 percent of that market in the United States and 36 percent worldwide. But he said volumes are small in that space. In the first quarter, about 100,000 new 4-way servers were sold worldwide, while two-way servers tend to sell in the millions, he said.

Dell, which saw its own server shipments and revenue drop in the first quarter said last week it would start to use AMD's Opteron processors in its four-way servers.

Intel has been hit hard by what many solution providers have said was a lackluster offering in its first dual-core server products. However, the company has released two new chips in the space, one a low-cost offering code-named Dempsey, and the other a lower-power, high-performance option, code-named Woodcrest, that Intel claims will even the score with Opteron.