According to the Taiwanese outlet DigiTimes, the loss of orders from Apple is going to cause Intel a fair bit of grief. With its transition from Intel-based MacBooks to custom in-house Arm silicon slated to complete fully by 2022, the former is expected to lose nearly 50% of its orders from Apple in 2021. This will result in Intel losing roughly 10% of its share in the notebook market by the end of 2021, with another 10% or higher going to AMD, pushing its overall market share to under 80% for the first time in several decades.
As per Mercury Research, AMD presently holds between 17-19% of the notebook CPU share, with Intel hanging onto the remaining 80% or so. So, DigiTimes is rather stating the obvious. As the orders from Apple come to a complete halt, Intel’s share will drop to under 70% as a matter of fact. Looking at how competitive the market has been of late, it’s also very likely that AMD will settle close to 25% by 2023. That would leave Intel with 60-65% of the overall notebook market. Not a very pleasant sight if you consider that the company held more than 95% of the market just a few years back.
Not all is doom and gloom though for Intel. Over the last two quarters, the company has consistently gained some market from AMD, 1.2% in Q4 2020 and 1% in Q1 2021 (QoQ). However, its market share still dropped by 2% and 1% on a YoY basis over the two quarters. Furthermore, AMD has been prioritizing the higher-end and more expensive Cezanne-based Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 SKUs which are quite a bit efficient than Intel’s Tiger Lake SKUs, while Intel has shown growth primarily in the lower-margin and lower-priced Celeron segments.
