Processor vendor ranking 2012: Qualcomm and Samsung overtake AMD

The sluggish growth in desktop PC market and increased sales of smartphones and tablets are causing changes in processor vendor market share. IC Insights has reported its latest analysis on MPU ranking in year 2012. Below is the details of analysis disclosed by IC Insights. Advanced Micro Devices down to fourth place in microprocessor sales in 2012 from second, where AMD had been perched behind Intel since the 1990s, according to a new ranking of MPU suppliers by IC Insights. The new top 10 MPU list shows most leading suppliers of mobile processors based on ARM technology moving higher in the ranking while PC-dependent x86 MPU companies—Intel and AMD—continued to lose market share in 2012 (see Figure). Among the MPU leaders shown in the figure below, only top-ranked Intel and fourth-place AMD sell central processors built with x86 micro architectures for standard notebook and desktop PCs running Windows operating system software from Microsoft. The remaining top 10 suppliers develop and sell mobile MPUs with RISC processor cores licensed from ARM in the U.K.
Moving ahead of AMD in the 2012 microprocessor ranking were Qualcomm, the cellphone IC sales leader that’s been primarily successful in selling cellphone application processors, and Samsung, which in additi...