Storage price hikes are crushing DIY! Desktop CPU shipments plummet 20%: AMD, however, enjoys its brightest moment.

According to market research firm Mercury Research's Q2 2026 x86 CPU market report, overall CPU shipments grew over 10% quarter-over-quarter, far exceeding normal seasonal trends, but desktop CPU shipments plunged over 20% year-over-year, making it the bleakest segment in the market.

Mercury Research chief analyst Dean McCarron stated that actual shipments of x86 and Arm CPUs grew strongly in Q2, mainly driven by Intel significantly increasing shipments in the mobile segment, as well as AMD's continued volume ramp-up.

However, on a year-over-year basis, the CPU market still showed contraction in shipments, with the main drags being declines in IoT, SoC, and embedded product shipments, along with the sharp drop in desktop CPUs.

AMD gained share across all major segments, with overall x86 market share reaching a record high of 30.7%. Including IoT, console SoCs, and embedded products, AMD's share stood at 34.1%—the company's brightest moment in over a decade.

Specifically, due to graphics card shortages and rising prices for motherboards, memory, and SSDs, desktop CPUs saw the largest shipment decline this quarter, with shipments falling over 20% both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter.

Both AMD and Intel saw sharp declines in desktop CPU shipments, but AMD's decline was smaller than Intel's, allowing its share to rise to 34.9%, up from 33.2% in Q1 and 32.2% in the same period last year. Intel's share fell to 65.1%, down from 66.8% in Q1 and 67.8% a year earlier.

It's worth noting that AMD's desktop CPU share gain this time wasn't due to selling more, but rather to losing less.

The mobile CPU market painted a completely different picture, with Intel adding millions of units of mobile CPU capacity in Q2, easing the supply bottlenecks of previous quarters.

However, AMD's shipment growth rate was nearly on par with Intel, with share rising from 28.3% in Q1 to 28.9%, up 8.4 percentage points from 20.6% in Q2 last year. Intel still dominated with 71.1%, but its share continued to decline.

The server CPU market grew nearly 20% year-over-year, with AMD's server CPU share rising to 34.5%, up from 33.2% in Q1 and 27.3% in the same period last year. Looking solely at the core data center market of EPYC versus Xeon, AMD's share reached 46.4%, up 9.2 percentage points year-over-year, just one step away from catching up to Intel.

Mercury Research noted that because Intel classifies edge and network processors under its data center and AI business line, AMD's actual share is still underestimated.