AMD’s desktop CPU share soars 10 percentage points in a year

AMD’s desktop CPU market share jumped nearly 10 percent in the last year, an analyst reported Thursday, on the heels of AMD’s strong rollout of its latest desktop gaming CPU.

Mercury Research, which tracks the market share of PC CPUs from AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm, reported sweeping gains in most segments of the CPU market. A portion of the report specific to AMD was provided to journalists by AMD, but confirmed by Mercury.

In general, because of the relatively low share of Qualcomm Snapdragon X CPUs, any share gains AMD realizes usually reflect a corresponding drop in Intel’s market share.

AMD’s results were excellent: The company’s desktop market share, in units, increased by 9.6 percentage points year-over-year, to 28.7 percent. In mobile, AMD now holds 22.3 percent of the CPU market, an increase of 2.8 percentage points. Intel typically holds 80 percent of the market, and AMD the other 20 percent. In overall client processors, that relationship still largely holds true: AMD sold 23.9 percent of all client CPUs during the period.

In desktops, at least, there’s evidence of strong momentum for AMD’s existing Ryzen 7000X, 8000G and 9000X chips — even with middling 9000X reviews and post-launch, performance-altering Windows updates. Mercury’s numbers report the last year’s worth of sales. But the future looks bright, too. AMD just launched its Ryzen 9000X3D chips this week, and our Ryzen 7 9800X3D review reflects the majority opinion: It “obliterates” Intel’s best.

Intel, of course, is wrestling with significant layoffs as well as buckets of red ink in its most recent earnings report. Analysts have begun to scrutinize Intel’s foundry plan, amid Intel complaints that it hasn’t seen a dime of the CHIPS Act money that’s been promised to build new fabs in the United States. President-elect Trump has threatened to at least rework the CHIPS Act, too.

Mercury’s report is excerpted below, with one caveat: Revenue numbers are calculated by AMD itself, and not Mercury, Mercury analyst Dean McCarron said. AMD claims that server revenue share — its market share of the total amount spent on servers, rather than units — hit 33.9 percent, a new record. The report also excludes semicustom chips AMD sells into game consoles, as well as chips that sell into Internet of Things (IOT) devices.