Market research firm iSuppli released its latest report on the state of the microprocessor market today, which show Intel has grown its already considerable lead by 1.1 percentage points over the last year while AMD saw its share fall by the same amount to 10.4%. Analyst Matthew Wilkins attributed Intel's year-on-year increase in market share to a recovery in the PC market and strong shipments of the company's new Sandy Bridge chips.

Indeed, Intel has described this as the fastest ramp-up of any product in the company's history. In July, Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini said that this year, two-thirds of the chips the company will sell would be based on Sandy Bridge. Intel is said to have benefited particularly from strong sales in the corporate PC market.

  Q2 2010 Q1 2011 Q2 2011
Intel 80.7% 82.6% 81.8%
AMD 11.6% 10.1% 10.4%
Others 7.7% 7.3% 7.7%

But while Intel was clearly the star of the CPU market on a year-to-year basis, sequentially the outcome didn't look too bad for AMD. The company's share in terms of revenue in the second quarter rose to 10.4%, up 0.3% from 10.1% in the first quarter, compared to Intel's 0.7 percentage point decline from 82.6% in the first quarter.

This has come down to the firm knocking out more of its Fusion chips, particularly those comprising its Brazos platform for lightweight notebooks and netbooks, reversing a continued shipment decline over the three previous quarters. The ramp for AMD's "Llano" A-Series APUs was supposed to be even faster, but the company recently admitted it is having 32nm yield, ramp and manufacturing issues at GlobalFoundries factory in Dresden, Germany.