According to a new report from Washington, D.C.-based market watcher Current Analysis, October was a very good month for AMD: The chipmaker passed archrival Intel Corp. as the leading supplier of CPUs for the U.S. retail PC market, with AMD processors in 49.8 percent of the desktops and laptops sold versus Intel's 48.5 percent. AMD also edged Intel's retail sales in September. Intel still tops AMD in overall processor sales when you add PCs sold direct, from vendors such as Dell, to the retail traffic. Still, Current Analysis research director Matt Sargent says, AMD's results are impressive when you consider that it doesn't supply any chips to retail powerhouses Toshiba and Sony -- although 77 percent of HP retail PCs last month had AMD inside.

"This is a wake-up call to Intel," Sargent adds. "It'll be interesting to see how Toshiba and Dell take the news, because they get some advantages by being 100 percent Intel. But AMD clearly is showing a price/performance advantage." To some extent, Sargent says, Intel has been focusing on higher-profit-margin notebook PC sales with its Centrino branding campaign, but there's still plenty of interest in desktops -- where Intel's Pentium 4 processors are "priced poorly ... You have to pay more for a lot less than what AMD is offering." For that matter, AMD's mobile Turion processors are "coming on strong." But its autumn wins won't mean much if AMD stumbles in the upcoming holiday season, Sargent explains: "Christmas is where the real volume is ... Where you're likely to see Intel make up the volume is in the special promotions like the $499 notebooks [that] Toshiba and Dell have done in the past and will probably do again later this year."

-- David Needle; adapted from internetnews.com