AMD managed to snatch a fair bit of business from its larger rival in the fourth quarter of last year. According to the latest figures from iSuppli, the company's microprocessor revenue market share amounted to 12.1%, a gain of 1.6 percentage points year over year, while Intel's portion fell by 1 percentage point during the same period. The latter remained the market leader by far with an 80.6% share, though.

  Q4 2008 Q3 2009 Q4 2009
Intel 81.6% 80.5% 80.6%
AMD 10.5% 11.9% 12.1%
Others 7.9% 7.7% 7.3%

For the full year the numbers were more balanced. In fact, the research firm estimates that both AMD and Intel saw revenue share increases at the expense of other suppliers. The former ended 2009 with a 12.1% revenue share, up 0.2% from 2008, while Intel ended the year with an 80.3% share, an increase of 0.3 of a percent from a year ago.

The gains might seem a bit surprising considering iSuppli notes that average selling prices for PCs dropped quite a bit last year. They are also especially notable for AMD which has been confined to the lower end of the CPU market for a while. Nevertheless, the numbers above suggest that neither AMD nor Intel were overly punished by the drop in prices.