El Segundo (CA) - In a preliminary report issued yesterday by iSuppli, Hewlett-Packard appears to be closing the gap with market leader Dell even more tightly, with only two percentage points now separating them in figures for the first quarter of this year. With PC shipments from the top five vendors in iSuppli’s rankings unexpectedly rising 12.8% over Q1 2005, HP captured the lion’s share of those gains, with 1.5 million more PCs shipped in the previous quarter over Q1 2005.

Dell’s PC shipments also rose by just under a million units year-over-year, though its PC market share declined by iSuppli’s estimate to 16.8%, versus 14.8% for HP. There was also good news for #4 Acer, which shipped over 800,000 more units than at this time last year, and whose market share gained a point to 5.0%.

It’s worth noting, though, that combined market share for the top five PC manufacturers slipped by six percentage points year-over-year, to 53.6% from 59.6%, suggesting a more competitive market overall. Yesterday’s announcement of Dell’s willingness to use AMD processors in its new high-end servers won’t have any direct affect on these particular numbers going forward, as they pertain to general PC shipments, not servers.