Early this summer AMD will debut its new Trinity chips, which promise to deliver the same performance while consuming half the power of AMD’s A-series chips. Launching alongside them: A new class of ultrathin, lightweight laptops to run them.

Why are they called “ultrathin” when we’ve been taught to refer to these devices as “Ultrabooks”?

Because Ultrabook is a moniker trademarked by Intel and entirely off limits to AMD.

So what’s to distinguish an ultrathin laptop from an Ultrabook, keeping in mind that they’re really both just laptops with sillier names?

Evidently, the biggest difference between the two will be price. Sources tell the occasionally reliable Digitimes that AMD is looking to seriously undercut Intel on this front by pricing Trinity 10 percent to 20 percent lower than its rival’s offering.

If that is indeed the case, these ultrathin machines could end up being $100-$200 cheaper than their Ultrabook couterparts. A troubling development for Intel, which is hoping the Ultrabook will carve out a 40 percent slice of the laptop PC market. The company has said in the past that it plans to drop the Ultrabook’s price over time. With AMD now aiming to undercut it, it may need to make those price cuts earlier and deeper.

Buoyed by increasing sales in enterprise and explosive growth in the Asia Pacific, the company’s share of the global PC market passed the 5 percent mark last quarter, for the first time in 15 years, according to analyst Charlie Wolf of Needham & Co.

Mac shipments grew 24.6 percent in the September quarter, a period during which the broader PC market grew just 5.3 percent. It was the 22nd consecutive quarter that the growth of Mac shipments has outpaced the market. And beyond this, shipments for the past year represented 20 percent of the growth in worldwide PC shipments.

The Mac’s got serious momentum.

In the business market, its growth was a staggering 43.8 percent, more than nine times greater than the 4.8 percent growth posted by the rest of the business market.

And in the home market? There, the Mac saw 25.6 percent growth, compared to overall growth of only 4.0 percent.

Interesting, because in the home market, the iPad was expected to cannibalize at least some Mac sales. In fact, during Apple’s third-quarter earnings call, CEO Tim Cook conceded that point. But evidently that cannibalization is minor at most, and far worse for Apple’s rivals. As Wolf observes, Mac sales in the home market have continued to increase, while sales of Windows notebook PCs have slowed.

“The iPad is undoubtedly cannibalizing some Mac sales,” Wolf writes. “But it appears to be cannibalizing PC sales a lot more. In our view, this underscores the power of the halo effect in overwhelming the impact of any cannibalization the Mac might have experienced following the launch of the iPad.”

Which is essentially what Tim Cook said, back in July.

“Some customers chose to purchase an iPad instead of a Mac, but even more decided to buy an iPad over a Windows PC,” he remarked at the time. “There are a lot more Windows PCs to cannibalize than Macs.”

According to the latest metrics from Gartner, Mac shipments to Western Europe were up 19.6 percent in the third quarter, a period that saw an 11.4 percent decline across the broader market.

PC shipments in Western Europe totaled 14.8 million units in the third quarter of 2011, an 11.4 percent decline from the same period last year, according to Gartner. Among the top five PC makers, only Apple and Asus resisted that downward spiral, which slowed Hewlett-Packard’s growth by 7.5 percent, Dell’s by 10 percent and Acer’s by a gruesome 45.1 percent.

A similar scene played out in the U.K., though there it was Apple and Samsung that led the market with year-over-year growth of 21.8 percent and 39 percent, respectively. Again, the broader market suffered a nasty decline, seeing growth slip by 11 percent year over year, and HP, Dell and others all suffered for it. The third quarter was particularly nasty for Acer, which saw its U.K. sales plummet by 53.1 percent.

Keep in mind, we’re talking about the third quarter here, traditionally a strong one driven by back-to-school sales.

So what’s behind the decline? Hard to say. Gartner theorizes that one factor is consumer confidence that’s been beaten into submission by disheartening economic issues. That certainly makes sense, though it doesn’t really explain the performance of Apple, Asus and Samsung, which all defied the downward trend. That they were able to grow PC shipments during such a time suggests there’s some significant competive rebalancing going on in the market right now.

In the second quarter of 2011, PC sales in China reached $11.9 billion; PC shipments rose 14.3 percent year over year to 18.5 million units. Meanwhile, PC sales in the States slipped to $11.7 billion, and shipments dropped 4.9 percent to 17.7 million units.

This is the first time China has overtaken the U.S. to become the world’s largest market for personal computers, and while it’s not likely to hold that title on a full-year basis in 2011, thanks to the holiday buying season in the States, it will probably claim it in 2012.

“China’s lead in the PC market is a huge shift that reflects the rising fortunes of emerging markets as well as the relative stagnation of more mature regions,” IDC VP Loren Loverde said in a statement. “While the immediate economic circumstances in the U.S. and other markets had a significant impact on the timing of China’s move to the lead, they have not changed the trend, but accelerated it.”

What gives? The research firms don’t have access to the same kinds of sales-channel data that Intel does, especially when it comes to emerging markets. Namely Brazil, Turkey, Russia and other rapidly developing revenue streams.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini called this “channel revenue” during the conference call with analysts. Channel is industry lingo for the business Intel does that’s not with major PC manufacturers like Apple or Hewlett-Packard or Dell, but instead goes through indirect sales channels to smaller companies that make PCs with lesser-known brands geared toward specific markets.

This channel revenue grew 17 percent during the quarter, Otellini said, because demand for PCs remains healthy in these countries. Turkey and Indonesia were both up 70 percent over last year. India was up 17 percent. Russia, 15 percent. China, 14 percent. Latin America as a whole was up 12 percent.

But then there’s Brazil. Otellini said it’s growing like crazy and is on track to become the world’s third-largest PC market next year, after the U.S. and China.

This channel business in emerging markets helps explain at least part of the dichotomy between the results that Gartner and IDC report in their quarterly market surveys — both of which show a market that grew by less than three percent — and Intel, which saw sales in its PC division grow 11 percent.

Later, Otellini and Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith addressed this issue in response to a question from Evercore analyst Patrick Wang. You can hear their exchange, which runs less than three minutes, below.

Intel-q2-2011-call by ahess247

Not going to happen any time soon, says Goldman Sachs (unless Gianfranco Lanci somehow gets a job at Apple).

Apple will own the tablet market for at least the next two years–perhaps longer if no true rivals emerge from the sad cavalcade of iPad contenders we’ve seen to date. Worst case scenario, the research house expects Apple to hold at least 54 percent of the tablet market in 2011 and 2012. And if non-iPad tablets sell below expectations, the company could claim as much as 74 percent market share in 2011 and 71 percent market share in 2012.

Notably, Goldman believes the latter scenario to be more likely at this point. And the implications of that are pretty interesting, to say the least. Stuck in the mid-single digits in PC market share for years, Apple is poised to ride the success of the iPad to some big gains this year and next. It may even hit double digits.

“If we include tablets in our PC unit forecast, then our estimates suggest Apple’s combined iPad and Mac market share would reach 12 percent in 2011,” says Goldman. “This represents an incremental $8.7 billion in iPad gross profits for Apple, or more than the $6.0 billion in profits we expect the company to generate from the Mac business. Based on the current market share breakdown in the PC market, this could presumably make Apple one of the largest vendors in the combined PC and tablet market.”

That’s a profound reshuffling of the industry. And while it’s been suggested that it’s temporary, Goldman theorizes that it could become permanent if the tablet’s cannibalization of the traditional PC market continues. Says Goldman, “There has been ample evidence that the iPad began to immediately cannibalize Wintel notebook and netbook units upon its launch. Indeed, PC unit growth has been sub-seasonal since the iPad’s debut and annual unit growth has deteriorated substantially. The most recent IDC data suggests that this continued into the first quarter of 2011, with PC units declining 3.2 percent year-over-year and 13 percent sequentially.”

Apple reports earnings after market close this afternoon.

An astonishing spike. And it’s even more astonishing when you break it down by sector. In the global home or consumer market, the Mac posted shipment growth of 17.1 percent, while the broader market posted a decline of .6 percent. In the business market, Mac shipments grew 65.4 percent compared to the market growth rate of 9.7 percent. And in government, they grew 549.5 percent compared to the broader market’s 8.4 percent. Of course, government sales represent only 1 percent of total Mac sales, so that spike appears more dramatic than it really is, but still…

So what’s the engine for all this growth? Needham analyst Charlie Wolf thinks it’s a halo effect from Apple’s iOS device trinity–the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad–particularly, the latter two, which are gaining lots of traction in both the home and business markets (Oddly, Apple suffered a decline in the education segment, where it has traditionally been pretty strong).

“The surge in Mac sales in the business market coincided with the introduction of the iPad in the second quarter of 2010,” says Wolf. “It would be foolish to assign a cause and effect connection between the two events. However, in less than a year, the iPad has been deployed or piloted in 80 of the Fortune 100 companies, and it’s reasonable to assume the device has invaded smaller businesses at a similar pace. It’s likely, then, that the halo effect emanating from the iPad will be far stronger than the iPhone halo effect in the business market if only because the iPad is a kissing cousin of Apple’s family of notebook computers.”

Hardly a surprise given recent trends. Recall that retail notebooks in the United States have been charting decelerating growth for months now, driven largely by the iPad. Now with RIM’s PlayBook, Hewlett-Packard’s “PalmPad” and dozens of other tablets headed to market it’s only going to slow further.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Forecast: 19 Million Notebooks Lost to Tablet Cannibalization (Meaning iPad) in 2011
• IPad: Tonight We Feast on Laptop Flesh!
• Apple: The iPad Isn’t Cannibalizing the Mac, But We Sure Hope It’s Cannibalizing the PC
• IPad No Cannibal, Says Analyst
• Apple’s iPad: Angel or Cannibal?

Which would spike iPad sales from 14 million this year to 36 million in 2011.

“We model Apple’s iPad continuing to dominate…in 2011,” Cihra writes in his 2011 forecast. “iPad not only launched with phenomenal early uptake but effectively sent all wannabes back to the drawing board, delaying most competitive tablet launches well into CY11. Yet we now already look forward to the first iPad 2 refresh in March (i.e., establishing annual cadence for iPads in March, iPhone each June and iPods in Sept). An enormous multi-year opportunity, we continue to view iPads less about the ‘product’ but rather igniting an explosion toward ‘thin-client’ Access computing.”

Given that explosion and Cihra’s forecast of a 226 percent spike in tablet sales, how will the the PC fare in 2011? A bit worse than it did the year prior. Cihra figures global PC market unit growth will slow to about 9 percent in 2011 from 14 percent in 2010.

Guess what happened to that missing five percent?

Says Cihra, “We see cannibalization from ‘thin-client’ iPads/tablets, particularly vs. netbooks and in multi-PC homes, already growing to 1/7th the size of the overall PC market in 2011 and shaving 5 percentage points off what PC growth might otherwise have been.”

Unless, of course, you consider the tablet part of the PC market. If you do, then the global PC market in 2011 and beyond looks quite a bit better, as the chart below shows.

• 13.7 million Macs sold in FY 2010
• That’s 3 times the number of Macs Apple sold just five years ago
• The Mac’s installed base is 50 million
• Mac sales accounted for $22 billion in revenue in FY 2010
• That’s 33 percent of Apple’s revenue
• And it’s enough to make the company’s Mac business No. 110 on the Fortune 500–if it were a standalone business
• Quarterly Mac sales grew 2.5 times faster than the rest of the industry (according to IDC)
• The Mac has outgrown the PC market for 18 straight quarters
• The Mac claims 20.7 percent of the U.S. retail market (according to NPD)
• There are 600,000 Mac developers
• The above number is growing by 30,000 per month
• Mac customer satisfaction is the highest in the industry
• It’s No. 1 in customer satisfaction (according to ACSI)
• It’s No. 1 in tech support for the last seven years (according to Consumer Reports)
• It’s No. 1 in customer support (according to PC World)
• There are 318 Apple retail stores in 11 countries
• Apple retail stores sold 2.8 million Macs last year
• 50 percent of them were sold to first-time Mac buyers
• Apple sold 2 million iPhoto photo books in the past year
• There are 5 million GarageBand users

Analysts had been expecting the company to report earnings of 50 cents a share, on revenue of $11 billion, according to a consensus survey by Thomson Reuters. Intel (INTC) turned in third quarter earnings of 52 cents a share on revenue of $11.1 billion. The company said it sees fourth-quarter sales hitting $11.1 billion, plus or minus $400 million. Consensus forecast for the period is $11.32 billion.

Evidently, the “weaker than expected demand for consumer PCs in mature markets” that CEO Paul Otellini warned of last month isn’t quite as weak as he’d thought. Certainly, in today’s earnings release, he sounded quite a bit more optimistic. “These results were driven by solid demand from corporate customers, sales of our leadership products and continued growth in emerging markets,” he said. “Looking forward, we continue to see healthy worldwide demand for computing products of all types…”

Though Q1 global shipments of microprocessors slipped 5.6 percent from Q4 due to seasonality, they grew 39 percent over the same quarter in 2009. And, as IDC analyst Shane Rau notes, that is good news indeed.

“PC processor shipments typically decline around seven to eight percent going from fourth quarter to first quarter,” Rau said in a statement. “A decline of 5.6 percent is modest and wouldn’t mean much by itself. However, after the huge rise in shipments we saw in the fourth quarter, it adds more credibility to market recovery and that the PC industry anticipates improvement in PC end demand in 2010.”

To that end, IDC is predicting PC processor unit growth of 15.1 percent for 2010, though it concedes that it could prove a conservative estimate. And that may well prove to be the case. Earlier this month Intel, the world’s largest PC chip maker, reported the highest first-quarter sales ever…