"There was no wholesale shift to Intel," said Tony Parkinson, vice president and general manager of industry-standard servers at Hewlett-Packard Asia-Pacific. "The AMD guys are very loyal."

That's good news for AMD, but Asian shipments of AMD-based servers still did not grow as fast as the overall market in recent quarters, according to Rajnish Arora, director of enterprise server and workstation research at IDC Asia-Pacific. "That's a sign they're not doing too well. Usually, If someone is doing well they are growing faster than the market," he said.

Server industry sources confirmed that assessment, indicating sales of Opteron-based servers dropped off sharply during the first quarter of 2008.

While IDC has yet to release data for the first quarter of 2008, it found that AMD steadily lost market share through the second half of last year. AMD's share of the Asian x86-server market peaked during the second quarter of 2007, with 9.9 percent of the market, before falling to 8.1 percent during the fourth quarter. That decline was largely due to rising shipments of Intel's quad-core Xeon 5300 processors, also known as Clovertown, Arora said.

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