Advanced Micro Devices" positions in the market of workstations have never been really strong primarily due to the fact that not a lot of system builders used AMD"s chips in business-oriented personal computers. While along with popularization of AMD Opteron processors the company"s market share began to increase slowly, the introduction of new dual-core and quad-core Intel Xeon processors have managed to fight nearly everything back.
Back in Q2 2006 the market share of uni-processor (UP) and dual-processor (DP) AMD Opteron workstations was 3.6% and 13.3%, respectively, which was not even close to Intel"s 96.4% and 86.7%, but still was historically highest. But then Intel introduced its Core 2 micro-architecture along with dual-core as well as quad-core processors and started to fight back the lost share, which lead to logical results: Intel Xeon chips commanded 98% of UP and 92% of DP workstations in Q1 2007, whereas AMD Opteron central processing units could be found only in 2% of single-processor and 8% of dual-processor workstation systems, a report from Jon Peddie Research estimates.