IDC: Chip Sector Rebound Not What it Seems - Page 2

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This despite a steady stream of new products from AMD. "They aren't setting the market on fire yet," said Rau. "They are mostly focused on righting their business and getting new products out into market and are looking toward the second half before they reach any significant volumes."

Intel was strongest in servers. It has been steadily gnawing away at AMD's portion of the server business, and now owns 89.9 percent of the business compared to 10.1 percent for AMD. A year ago, it was 86.2 percent to 13.8 percent.

This reflects leftover ill-effects from the Barcelona delay debacle. "They hurt themselves with their OEM relationships with Barcelona. With Shanghai and Istanbul they are still turning that boat around and probably will bottom out at the 10 percent mark in my figures and probably go up from here," he said.

On the desktop, Intel is losing ground to AMD. It held 70.2 percent of the desktop space to AMD's 29.4 percent. In Q2 2008, Intel had 73.3 percent and AMD had 26.4 percent. In mobile, the two held virtually even to 2008 figures. Intel had 86.9 percent, a slight bump from Q2 08's 86.5 percent, and AMD was even with 12.6 percent of the market.

VIA Technologies, which had made a wave with its C7 processor in the netbook space, is quickly losing steam. It peaked in Q3 2008 at 1.2 percent. Now it has just 0.5 percent.

Riding along the bottom

For now, Rau said a recovery is a ways off. IDC doesn't see PC chip sales surpassing 2008 levels until at least 2012.

"We're riding along the bottom and the variations you see are driven by typical seasonal patterns. If you look at 2009 in isolation, yes, the second half will be better than the first half, but compared to 2008 and 2007, we're at lower levels. We have to get through the first half of 2010 before we see recovery," he said.

Windows 7's release in late October could be a positive, but only a light bump in sales, he predicts.

"Their release schedule is a little tight for holiday buying. I think it will be a modest help but it's not a panacea. There might be some pent-up demand, but consumers have to be able to buy the PC. They have to have the disposable income," said Rau.