Wednesday, February 3rd 2021

Despite AMD Momentum, Intel Claws Back Market Share in Both Desktop and Mobile
AMD's CPU offerings are generally considered to best Intel's competition, especially since the company's Zen 3, Ryzen-5000 series of CPUs launched to great critical and customer acclaim. However, silicon performance can only get you so far - one other issue impacting market penetration is availability of said processors. As AMD fights for constrained wafer supply from TSMC - in no small part due to their focusing of their entire portfolio on the company's highly-sought 7 nm process - users worldwide are generally seeing insufficient stocks of AMD silicon to satisfy their needs. And as such, it seems that at least some users are going with Intel solutions, due to their higher availability in the market.
According to a report from Mercury Research, AMD's constrained chip supply has led the company to a market share loss QoQ. AMD's desktop penetration fell from 20.1% to 19.3% in a single quarter, and its mobile market share saw a similar decrease, going from a 20.1% share down to 19.1%. Of course, not only from market share and shipments are a company's financials made of; AMD ushered in higher ASP (Average Selling Price) for its products, leading the company to a 50% increase in YoY revenue. This doesn't mean AMD is selling less CPUs, however; the x86 CPU market grew a massive 20.1% YoY, so AMD is actually shipping more product than in previous years - it just couldn't account for the entirety of that x86 market increase. Overall, and considering AMD's desktop, mobile, and server markets, the company's x86 market share decreased by 0.7% in Q4 2020 to 21.7% - still a very significant increase, YoY, from its previous 15.5% of the market pie.
Sources:
Mercury Research, via Tom's Hardware
According to a report from Mercury Research, AMD's constrained chip supply has led the company to a market share loss QoQ. AMD's desktop penetration fell from 20.1% to 19.3% in a single quarter, and its mobile market share saw a similar decrease, going from a 20.1% share down to 19.1%. Of course, not only from market share and shipments are a company's financials made of; AMD ushered in higher ASP (Average Selling Price) for its products, leading the company to a 50% increase in YoY revenue. This doesn't mean AMD is selling less CPUs, however; the x86 CPU market grew a massive 20.1% YoY, so AMD is actually shipping more product than in previous years - it just couldn't account for the entirety of that x86 market increase. Overall, and considering AMD's desktop, mobile, and server markets, the company's x86 market share decreased by 0.7% in Q4 2020 to 21.7% - still a very significant increase, YoY, from its previous 15.5% of the market pie.
114 Comments on Despite AMD Momentum, Intel Claws Back Market Share in Both Desktop and Mobile
I got my 3800x in november of 2019 at 360€. Now the equivalent is over 100€ more expensive, and if you add the cost of the aftermarket cooling, that adds another 50-100€ on top of that. Too much money. That is the reason I didn't get Intel, my alternatives were the 9900K at over 500€ plus the cooling, or the 9700K, but it had no HT, and my I could use the motherboard I already had.
Now, I bought a 10400f for my son's gaming computer, 140€ for the CPU and 80€ for the mobo. Similar gaming performance to 3600 and cheaper (and cooler, even the crappy intel cooler is enough as it can't overclock).
So, I'm guessing the "can find any AMD CPU's for sale" claims are a tiny bit exaggerated.
However, something more seems to be going on. Covid era has been going on for a year, and prior to september/about 5 months ago there was lots of stock of everything. Now AMD GPUs and CPUs going back 4 generations (and Nvidia GPUs) are typically out of stock (here in Canada) at least. Mining, scalping, for GPU's I can see, but CPU's also?? hmmmmmmm
And it's showing up in AMD Vega APU growth :
Also of note, the 3060Ti, 3090, and 3070 have now made the charts (3080 made it last month and is still growing market share). RDNA2 is still a no show. The 570 and 580 were AMDs big GPU market share growth for January.
None of this bodes very well for PC gaming.
For the last 4 months 2 core CPUS actually decreased by 1.81%, 4 core CPUs by 2.47%, while 6 core CPUs increased by 2.28% and 8 core CPUs increased by 1.75%. Comparing November with January shows a similar trend. So only December is unusual, probably being skewed by the people starting to play Cyberpunk 2077.
That also means that the AMD growth in January is not as large as the percentages from my post show, but it is still a growth, even compared to November and earlier. The long-term trend is clearly positive for AMD. I don't think Intel actually recovered any gaming market share in December. More likely, people that are infrequent gamers dusted off their older Intel systems excited to play Cyberpunk and, after that excitement wore off, the statistics returned to normal in January.
This could easily be a million moms buying cheap laptops for their kids to work from home with, and those kids then using them to play games.
Can you define the term "nowhere"? It can be bought in many webshops. In terms of performance, the 8-core $450 5800X is faster than the 10-core $480 10900K, needs cheaper mobo for equal comparison (~ 3200 RAM). Sorry, what? If you buy a Comet Lake CPU, you have to buy a Z motherboard to be comparable to Zen3, as b450 and b550 mobos support higher speed RAMs while B460 mobos only support 2600 MHz. And don't forget that in terms of performance, the $300 5600X crushes the $262 10600K in CPU performance (and easily beats it in games too - around 10-11%) and it's much more closer to the $374 10700K, even beating it in some multithread apps)
It would be a cold day in hell before I bought Rocket Lake, it's pointless CPU. I might though consider Alder Lake if Zen 3 is still in short supply in 6 months.
Even the 10400f vs 3600, 140€ vs 200€. Intel has better stock too, so I understand his opinion.
And when I check that store inventory today they have 10+
i7 10700kf costs 340€. Again, I know 5800x is better but the difference in price is big
In my example I'm already on a AM4 Platform and its was just a processor upgrade so not really a fair comparison as I sold my 3800X so the cost to me was basically $250.
If I had a Ryzen 3600/x/3700x/3800x/3900 I wouldnt bother upgrading tho, great CPUs
My personal (and corporate) experience with Lenovo is that if they have a shipping date of more than one week, you'll be waiting for a couple of months before they cancel the order and tell you that the model you ordered is unavailable.
I've been buying laptops for myself and others for the better part of 20 years. Renoir's lack of availability is an outlier that sticks out like a sore thumb across my entire career history and COVID isn't entirely to blame because Intel 8th/9th/10th/11th gen have remained in good supply throughout the pandemic, even if particular models went out of stock during the busiest periods of national lockdows. I can still buy Ryzen 3500/3700U models without any difficulties, too.
This article is about AMD losing market share to Intel, and as much as I want AMD to be available, successful, and providing meaningful competition that benefits us as consumers, I'm not seeing it happening. The difficulties I've had sourcing Renoir laptops for the last year and the loss or retraction of design wins from OEMs over Q1-Q2 2020 have been eye-opening and out of the ordinary for the IT sector, my own experiences simply reinforce this news of AMD losing marketshare to Intel again.
AMD's going to have to stop lazing around on the GPU side, as well as work with OEMs to add TB support, if they want OEMs to put them into higher end ultrabooks. Flashy features like TB4 put Intel CPUs into those units even without Intel's bribes - no way an OEM is going to downgrade an existing model's feature set. Cezanne ain't it, unless some ballsy OEMs (Lenovo might be a frontrunner there) decide to throw something like a Titan Ridge controller in with the AMD platforms.
I watched the mobile Renoir launch with great interest, but there's no way I'm ditching an XPS 9370 for a Thinkpad X13. They've come a long way from the "budget brand" with better performance, but they really need to round it out with an attractive featureset before anyone can be arsed to put them in the high end.