A quarterly uptick in CPU shipments provides a spark of optimism for the PC market
For various reasons, it's been a pretty bleak couple of years for the PC market overall. The pandemic and worker furloughs (particularly in China), a weak global economy, component shortages and high selling prices have all combined to create something of a perfect storm. But the latest analysis from John Peddie Research shows a glimmer of hope. There are signs suggesting the worst of the PC market downturn is behind us, at least on the CPU side of things.
According to JPR, global client CPU shipments totaled 53.6 million units in the second quarter of 2023, which is an increase of 17% from the previous quarter. That's the good news. The not so good news is that year-on-year shipments are down by 23% for desktops and 25% for notebooks, though given the quarterly number, those results could have been a lot worse.
When broken down by vendor, Intel is the winner of the quarter, with an increase of 23% in market share, while AMD dropped by 5.3%. That can surely be attributed to the wider availability of notebooks with Intel 13th Gen CPUs and affordable 13th Gen desktop CPUs. AMD doesn't yet have affordable Ryzen 7000 series desktop CPUs, though notebook Zen 4 chips are trickling into the market.
Looking at the desktop versus notebook results, Notebooks are responsible for 72% of total CPU shipments, with desktops taking the remaining 28%.
This uptick in second quarter shipments bodes well for the rest of the year and hopefully for 2024. There are some major new CPU releases coming, plus there's the Black Friday sales and holiday season to come, making further recovery in the CPU market much more likely.
In terms of CPU releases, Intel's Raptor Lake refresh will be a driver of desktop CPU sales. Depending on Intel's release
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