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Advanced Micro Devices has claimed its highest market-share position against Intel in years, cracking the elusive 20 percent barrier, CNET News.com has learned.

AMD now accounts for 21.4 percent of all desktop, notebook and server processors using the x86 instruction set that were shipped during the fourth quarter, Mercury Research plans to announce next week. The chipmaker's share grew from 17.7 percent in the third quarter, on strong gains in all three of those segments.

Mercury Research's principal analyst Dean McCarron confirmed the numbers, which were provided by AMD, but declined to confirm Intel's market share during the fourth quarter until the final numbers are released next week.

However, Intel and AMD accounted for 98.6 percent of the x86 processor market in the third quarter, making Intel's share numbers simple to estimate. Assuming Intel and AMD kept 98.6 percent of the market in the fourth quarter, Intel's market share would have been around 77 percent.

Surging shipments of Opteron server processors have been one of the strongest reasons for AMD's success during 2005. The server market was almost completely absent from the company's strategy the last time they reached 20 percent market share, in 2001. AMD's share of the x86 processors shipped into the server market grew from 12.7 percent to 16.4 percent from the third quarter to the fourth.

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