According to Mercury Research, Intel gained three percentage points of market share, coinciding with a three per cent drop for AMD. This includes all CPU shipments, IoT, SoCs and custom chips inside consoles. Intel still leads strongly, with 68.4 per cent of the overall x86 market share, compared to AMD's 31.6 per cent share. If SoC and IoT shipments are excluded, Intel leads by 82.6 per cent to AMD's 17.4 per cent.

The CPU market suffers from excess inventory, but now Mercury Research president Dean McCarron says the inventory-induced downturn is "probably a thing of the past".

Shipments of AMD's console chips were forecast to decline, as the console shortage faded, and expected seasonal buying patterns caused a drop in demand. However, it experienced a slight gain in mobile and desktop share, but not enough to overcome the drop in console chip shipments.

Intel's growth in market share can be partly attributed to solid growth in the entry-level mobile CPU market, driven by Chromebook sales. Sales of entry-level 13th Gen processors have also contributed to overall client CPU sales, which grew by over 20 per cent for the quarter. 

It was not all bleak for AMD. The outfit saw a slight uptick in server share at Intel’s expense.

The third and fourth quarters are shaping up to be interesting. Once that data lands, we'll know if this second quarter improvement was the beginning of a recovery in the PC market or a speed bump on the road to a steeper decline.