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AMD Ryzen’s CPU sales lead will be short-lived in the face of Intel’s Coffee Lake launch

A real AMD Ryzen CPU

A Reddit post by ingebor has highlighted AMD’s Ryzen processors overtaking the entirety of Intel sales from one of Germany’s biggest tech retailers, Mindfactory. But while they’ve definitely had a good August, the reasons behind it aren’t down to AMD’s CPU success alone. Something Intel this way comes…

Ryzen’s on a roll, it’s even powering our pick of the best CPUs for gaming. How about that?

The Mindfactory figures make great reading for anyone on team Ryzen. The graphs that have been posted show the number of Ryzen – and Ryzen Threadripper – sales on a strong upward trajectory since their launch in March. Correspondingly, Intel chip sales have dropped from a high in March and April to a pretty stagnant level since then.

The crossover happened in August, with AMD buoyed by the launch of both the budget-oriented Ryzen 3 range of CPUs and the monstrous Threadripper high-end chips. Mindfactory’s numbers show the Ryzen processors selling over 7,000 units in August, with Intel sticking around the same 5,000 units level they’ve been at since May. In terms of the chip share at the German retailer that puts AMD at 56% and Intel at 44% for August.

Mindfactory AMD vs Intel sales

But it’s not just the actual units shipped that are in AMD’s favour either; they’re also beating Intel in actual revenue too, making the retailer more cash than Intel sales.

It’s worth pointing out here this is all based purely on some (admittedly interesting) stats from a sole German retailer. We’ve spoken to a few UK etailers and none are willing to give even a hint as to how the Ryzen vs. Core battle is going down on our verdant shores. These figures also only start from the launch of Ryzen, and don’t show any year-on-year data either.

But, on the face of it, it looks like AMD are marching towards CPU market dominance. Their low-end chips are starting to make them money, their ultra high-end Threadripper processors are dominating Intel’s Core X-series, and the Ryzen 5 1600X is the finest gaming CPU they’ve ever made.

If you’re expecting that AMD trajectory to carry on rising to the moon, however, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. The big question is: why would anyone want to buy a new Intel CPU right now?

It’s honestly not a huge surprise Intel aren’t really selling too many new CPUs rat the moment. It was August when they started making big noises about their 8th Gen Core architecture, with the confirmation there would be desktop Coffee Lake processors landing before the holidays at Computex in June this year.

Intel 8th Gen Core wafer

These will be Intel’s first mainstream six-core CPUs and, while they’re an obvious reaction to AMD’s Ryzen threadgasm, the whole desktop Coffee Lake range is going to get a hefty multi-threaded boost, alongside some serious single-threaded punch too. Single core performance is still key to gaming, and Intel retain total dominance on that score compared to AMD. Some rumours put the Core i5 hexcore some 19% quicker in single-threaded performance compared to the old i5 7600K gaming darling, which itself outpaces Ryzen in-game.

Coffee Lake’s Core i3 range gets another couple of cores too, with the i3 8350K set to ship with four non-HyperThreaded cores and a 17% single-threaded boost over the Kaby Lake i3 7350K. Essentially, that makes it the equivalent of the last-gen 7600K with an expected $100 price cut.

So, knowing all this, why there were even 5,000 new Intel CPUs sold in August is frickin’ mystery. The poor, uneducated fools, have they not been reading PCGamesN? I hear it’s pretty good…

The Intel 8th Gen Coffee Lake desktop chips are set to land in October and, with those likely to demand a lot of attention, I would be surprised if normal Intel-dominating service wasn’t resumed pretty swiftly, most especially among us gamers.