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In summary:
- PCWorld reports desktop CPU shipments plunged nearly 20% in Q1 2026, with rising component prices causing consumers to delay PC purchases and creating significant demand destruction.
- Intel maintains 70% market share despite supply constraints affecting laptop shipments, while AMD holds 30% overall but lost 3.2% desktop share sequentially due to weak sales.
- ARM processors reached 14.4% PC market share, and analysts predict holiday sales could drop 20% due to memory shortages and continued market challenges.
Desktop PC CPU shipments plunged more than expected during the first quarter of 2026, and darker clouds loom on the horizon.
In total, the total number of X86 processors sold into the PC market — mobile, PC, server, IoT — only fell about 6 percent from a year ago, a report issued Wednesday by Mercury Research found. However, Mercury noted that fourth-quarter sales had already weakened, and that the decrease simply added on to that. Desktop processor shipments declined at worse than typical rates, falling nearly 20 percent from a year ago, Mercury said.
That’s not particularly unusual, and yet it is.
As Mercury analyst Dean McCarron noted in an email, the CPU market typically declines between 15 to 20 percent in the first quarter, simply because fourth-quarter holiday sales represent the peak shopping period. However, McCarron said that AMD’s desktop CPU shipments during the first quarter were “unusually weak,” and “that’s probably due [to] people buying ahead of price increases, e.g. getting while the getting is good.”
In terms of significance, the change in buying behavior for AMD processors had a less meaningful impact than the seasonal drop, McCarron said. A small but growing factor, however, was the demand destruction as consumers held off buying desktop PCs because of component prices.
“It’ll be a bigger deal in [the second quarter] onwards,” McCarron said.
Other firms are already looking ahead. Analyst firm IDC said Wednesday that it predicts holiday PC sales to plunge 20 percent during the fourth-quarter period when sales are typically at their strongest, and 11.3 percent for the year, due to the ongoing shortages in flash memory and DRAM.
At the end of 2025, Intel publicly admitted to shortages of certain processors, especially older ones. As chipmakers started prioritizing higher-margin server silicon, PC makers and consumers were left scrambling to grab available memory, CPUs, and SSDs before they disappeared, sending prices upward. Now consumers are considering whether or not they actually want to pay out the nose for an upgrade. Put another way, you might be able to buy all three, but at what price?
“It seems likely due to pricing/demand destruction we’ll be switching from [a] supply-limited [situation] to demand-limited sometime mid-year, e.g. right about now,” McCarron said.
AMD’s market share finally declines
For once, the change in buying behavior hurt AMD. Though the company had reported several quarters of increasing share, AMD lost ground in the desktop market by 3.2 percentage points from the end of 2025 through the first quarter of 2026. Versus the first quarter of last year, however, AMD still gained 5.1 percentage points of desktop PC sales against Intel.
In laptops, however, it was Intel’s supply crunch that hurt the company. Overall, laptop CPU shipments declined in the low single digits, McCarron said, entirely due to Intel; AMD’s unit shipments increased. In his research note, McCarron suggested that the dip was “presumably due to Intel’s capacity constraints hitting mobile CPU supplies,” and that the first quarter would be the low point for Intel’s supply struggles.
Arm processors shipped by Qualcomm and Apple (and soon, Nvidia) weren’t affected by Intel’s capacity constraints. Mercury estimates that ARM’s PC share grew to about 14.4 percent in the first quarter of 2026, versus 13.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Overall, the Intel-AMD split (excluding AMD’s semicustom console business, embedded, and IoT) stands at an exact 70-30 split, with a loss of 5.6 percentage points on a year-over-year basis from Intel, and a complementary gain by AMD.