By | Tony Smith 1st November 2004 10:48

Intel lost 6.7% chipset market share in Q3

VIA the main beneficiary

Intel's chipset competitors stole market share from the chip giant during Q3.

So claims a Merrill Lynch report cited by a number of websites. The report assigns 62.1 per cent of the chipset market to Intel, 18.5 per cent to VIA, 9.9 per cent to SiS, 4.5 per cent to ATI and 4.2 per cent to Nvidia.

Between Q3 and Q2, Intel's share fell 6.7 percentage points, with VIA taking just over half - 3.6 percentage points - of the lost share. The rest was distributed evenly between SiS, ATI and Nvidia.

VIA posted its Q3 financial results last week and pointed to a 25 per cent jump in sales during the period. Clearly chipsets helped - sales were up 17 per cent sequentially for Intel-oriented parts; up 16 per cent for AMD-targeted chipsets - though company insiders also pointed to a big jump in desktop CPU sales too.

This quarter, Intel will be pushing at both the low- and high-end of the market with the cut-price 'Grantsdale' parts, the i910 and i915GV, while the just-launched i925XE comes in at the top, bringing the 1066MHz frontside bus with it.

VIA and co. may take a little longer to follow its lead, but they have strong AMD-oriented offerings, crucially now with PCI Express support. ®