AMD continues domination against Intel as CPU demand rises

AMD Ryzen
(Image credit: AMD)

AMD has made up some serious ground against Intel in the CPU market, recently overtaking its rival on desktop market share for the first time since 2006. It's difficult to correlate sales with consumer demand given the current stock issues faced by both CPU manufacturers, but Puget Systems has reported that AMD processor builds have skyrocketed.

Puget Systems is a PC system builder known for its workstations and business PCs, and historically, system builders are a good way of getting insight into how desirable components are. 

With the demand surging initially in 2019 around the release of Ryzen 3000, things are looking up for AMD and its latest Ryzen 5000 family members (and Threadripper Pro/Ryzen Pro).

It's important to note that we're not focused on the actual numbers of PCs sold by Puget Systems – we're simply referencing the demand percentages and how they could reflect on the market. AMD currently holds a 0.8% lead against Intel for overall desktop market share, so this could indicate that team red's win is more to do with a desire for its products than inventory being more plentiful.

In fact, Puget Systems dropped AMD processors altogether back in 2015 due to very low demand and only saw fit to reintroduce team red's CPU's when the Ryzen generation was released. 

Clash of the Titans

While Intel might have lost this round on the desktop CPU front, its laptop and server CPU market shares are absolutely dominant. According to Passmark, 80.1% of Windows laptops that are benchmarked run an Intel CPU, but the gap has been closing since early 2020. Servers are also almost completely Intel territory, with only a meager 1.5% running on AMD processors.

We could see some huge fluctuations in these numbers over the coming years however, especially with AMD laptops typically being cheaper than Intel counterparts, and the gaming performance of the Ryzen series makes them an attractive option for gaming ultrabooks.

It only took AMD four years to come back from a similar position getting nearly shut out of the desktop CPU front, so if the ongoing stock issues can be solved AMD is in a position to make life very difficult for Intel across all market sectors.

Via Tech Powerup

Jess Weatherbed

Jess is a former TechRadar Computing writer, where she covered all aspects of Mac and PC hardware, including PC gaming and peripherals. She has been interviewed as an industry expert for the BBC, and while her educational background was in prosthetics and model-making, her true love is in tech and she has built numerous desktop computers over the last 10 years for gaming and content creation. Jess is now a journalist at The Verge.