The world’s second largest provider of x86 chips, Advanced Micro Devices, said at conference that it would lower its sales guidance for the first quarter of fiscal 2007. Speaking to investors at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco, chief executive Hector Ruiz said AMD would not meet its first-quarter sales guidance of between $1.6 billion and $1.7 billion but noted: "The environment is very competitive, very competitive. We need to break the monopoly, and for that we"ve got to get above 30% [market share]," Mr. Ruiz said.
According to preliminary figures from a study by Mercury Research, Intel Corporation controlled 74.4% of the x86 chip market in Q4 2006, AMD owned 25.3% of the market and the remaining 0.3% were shared between companies like Transmeta Corporation and Via Technologies. In the last quarter of 2006, Intel shipped 77.7% of central processing units for servers, up from 76.3% in Q3 and 74.1% in Q2. AMD’s share in Q4 slipped to 22.3%, down from 23.7% in the prior quarter.