The report highlights that desktop PC CPU shipments plunged more than expected during the first quarter of 2026, and darker clouds loom on the horizon.
As part of the ongoing story, 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. 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.
According to the latest update, that’s not particularly unusual, and yet it is.
The report highlights that 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.”. 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.
According to the latest update, a small but growing factor, however, was the demand destruction as consumers held off buying desktop PCs because of component prices. In terms of significance, the change in buying behavior for AMD processors had a less meaningful impact than the seasonal drop, McCarron said.
According to the latest update, “It’ll be a bigger deal in [the second quarter] onwards,” McCarron said.
According to the latest update, 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. Other firms are already looking ahead.
As part of the ongoing story, 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? At the end of 2025, Intel publicly admitted to shortages of certain processors, especially older ones.
The report highlights that right about now,” McCarron said. “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.
In a fresh development, though the publisher 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. For once, the change in buying behavior hurt AMD.
As part of the ongoing story, 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. In laptops, however, it was Intel’s supply crunch that hurt the publisher.
The report highlights that 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. Arm processors shipped by Qualcomm and Apple (and soon, Nvidia) weren’t affected by Intel’s capacity constraints.
In a fresh development, 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.
The report highlights that he has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Highly adopted Science and Electronic Buyers' News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room. Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology.