According to Intel, their current share on the microprocessor market is the largest in about four years. Intel managed to occupy about 86.8% of the CPU market in the third quarter this year, about 7.1% increase compared to the third quarter 2001 and approximately 4% boost from the second quarter this year.

Intel's main rival is not doing very well these days. Under the pressure of the Santa Clara-based semiconductor giant, a lot of system integrators now use the Pentium 4 processors instead of the chips from Advanced Micro Devices. Moreover, AMD does not have a lot of carrots to offer their partners this time. The Athlon XP 2400+ processors appeared just a few days ago and some resellers already declined the price on these parts. When the 2600+ and 2700+ processors will appear this year, they also will not bring a high profit margin to the vendors, hence, they will not be too interested to push AMD chips in general. Presently AMD's market share is about 11.6%, 4% decline compared to the second quarter and more than 9% compared to same quarter last year.

Read more: x-bit labs.