AMD has made leaps and bounds when it comes to its new Ryzen processors, dominating the market with some of the best gaming CPUs you can buy right now. For the first time in three years, however, Intel has actually gained market share according to a report from Mercury Research (via Tom’s Hardware), jumping 0.8% and 1.2% in the desktop and mobile CPU markets respectively during the last quarter of 2020.
Some of Intel’s gains can be attributed to AMD’s stock woes across its CPUs and GPUs, which will continue for a number of months with ongoing demand for both gaming PC parts and the AMD-powered Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.
So, this data doesn’t suggest that AMD’s market share is reduced because the company is struggling to shift chips, but rather that its output just can’t keep up. In comparison, availability of Intel’s desktop CPUs has been pretty good. We’ve even seen some significant discounts on 9th and 10th gen Intel processors over the past few months, which would go some way to explain Intel’s market share increase.
AMD’s CPU stock situation looks like it may be on the rise, though, so the next market share report could paint a different picture. Some of AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series processors are now readily available on Amazon in Europe and the US at non-inflated prices, very similar to MSRP.
On the other hand, Intel is releasing two generations of processors this year, with the latter 12th gen possibly bringing much larger performance gains thanks to a new 10nm process, which could make Intel a much more popular option.