ATI saw its share of the chipset market jump during the first quarter of the year thanks to increasing demand for its Intel- and AMD-oriented products, figures issued this week by market watcher Mercury Research reveal. The company's gains came despite a 12 per cent sequential dip in chipset shipments.

Mercury's numbers - which come by way of a report to its clients cited by Xbit Labs - show ATI took 12 per cent of the chipset market in Q1 2006, up from just three per cent in Q1 2005. That put it in third place behind VIA, which saw its market share remain at 15 per cent, and Intel. The chip giant's 57 per cent market share was well down on the year-ago quarter's figure of 69 per cent.

Intel's Q1 2005 chipset market share was the highest it's achieved for some time, and it's been on the slide ever since. Last summer, it confessed it was shifting its chipset production capacity away from low-end products and toward high-end parts - a move it claimed at the time was temporary. Since then, it has warned again and again of limited supplies of certain chipsets.

Nvidia's share of the chipset market jumped year on year, too, from six per cent in Q1 2005 to nine per cent in Q1 2006. Like ATI, it's now above SiS, which saw its market share slide from seven per cent to six per cent, according to Mercury's numbers.

The market watcher's figures show that 77.4 per cent of all chipsets shipped in Q1 2006 supported Intel CPUs - most of the remainder targeted AMD CPUs. On the Intel side, Intel, VIA, ATI and SiS attained market shares of 74, 12, eight and six per cent, respectively. Nvidia, ATI, VIA and SiS respectively took 42, 28, 21 and nine per cent of the AMD-oriented chipset market in the first quarter. ®