World+Dog to favour dual-core laptops through 2014

Quad-core won't be big until the year after

Buy a laptop in 2015, and there will be a 50 per cent chance it will contain a quad-core processor.

So says market watcher iHS iSuppli, after sampling current shipment rates. This year fewer than one in ten notebooks - nine per cent, to be precise - will come with a four-core chip.

Hexa-core CPUs will reach that level of penetration, almost, in 2014, rising to 18 per cent the following year, iSuppli forecast this week.

To put that into real numbers: shipments of quad-core notebooks will total 160m units in 2015, up almost eightfold on the 21.2m that will ship this year.

You might expect quad-cores to be on a more rapid growth trend, but the inevitable need to temper performance with reduced power consumption hinders their implementation.

That's why, even four years from now, 33 per cent of notebooks will still be single- or, more likely, dual-core machines, iSuppli's numbers imply.

During the first three months of 2011, Intel accounted for 82.6 per cent of global microprocessor revenue, up 1.6 percentage points of share from its standing in Q4 2010.

AMD accounted for 10.1 per cent of global microprocessor revenue in Q1 2011, down from 10.9 per cent in Q4 2010, itself down on the 11.8 per cent share it took in Q3 2010, iSuppli said. ®