The other trend of note was that of AMD's almost doubling of its shipments from Q1 to Q2, mainly due to "large orders across sectors".

"In the x86 space, AMD surpassed 20 percent revenue share in the market and the rest is taken up by Intel," Ward said, adding Sun and HP were the only vendors to offer a range of AMD-based products.

"IBM had a moderate quarter and was pretty much flat, [but] has seen stronger growth in low-end Unix products, including OpenPower."

Both Dell and HP had a strong quarter in terms of units shipped, but their revenues were generally flat compared with same time last year.

Ward said the Unix market is declining with migrations of industry standard servers, but this trend has been slower than the previous year.