Intel Regains CPU Market Share that it lost to AMD, Latest Steam Hardware Survey

[AleksandarK]

Valve has released its Steam Hardware Survey results for the month of June, and as always, it is a pretty good indication of the gaming market and market trends, showing us just how well the companies providing hardware are doing. On the CPU front, there are two companies constantly fighting for market domination: Intel and AMD. A bit over a month ago, we reported that AMD made serious progress in taking the market share away from Intel, using its latest Ryzen 5000 series of processors. However, this time, the effect seems to be reversed by its competitor, Intel.

All the gains AMD has made in the past few months have been sort of "erased" by Intel, as team blue managed to get back to a point where AMD now holds 28.41% of the CPU market, while Intel is back to over 70% share, more specifically 71.58%. What this means is that there are some fluctuations happening right now, and we are eager to see more reports to analyze in what direction is the market moving and how the two competing companies are performing. AMD seems to be held back by their ability to produce enough CPUs, while Intel is happily filling that void, fueled by a more aggressive pricing strategy.



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[ZoneDymo]

....but.....why...how....who would buy a PC today and go for Intel?

Dont get me wrong, im planning to go for Alderlake myself should that turn out to be worth a damn (its just a weird piece of tech for what we know so im interested)....but like if I had to get something now I would never ever go for Intel, thats just rediculous..(well unless the price is extremely agreable I guess).

 

[R0H1T]

You do know this is "Steam" survey BS

They're about as reliable as some of those Pew Pew surveys!

 

[z1n0x]

Could be some bug/glitch, like the previous spike.

 

[ixi]

....but.....why...how....who would buy a PC today and go for Intel?

Dont get me wrong, im planning to go for Alderlake myself should that turn out to be worth a damn (its just a weird piece of tech for what we know so im interested)....but like if I had to get something now I would never ever go for Intel, thats just rediculous..(well unless the price is extremely agreable I guess).

Lets remember that from all the world. Theoreticaly there are only 5-10% people who knows pc parts . Other half. It runs? - buy! it looks good? - buy

 

[GeorgeJr]

Damn, that article title...

 

[bobsled]

Easy. Intel just bot created 100,000 accounts and logged them into Intel lab CPUs...

 

[ZoneDymo]

Lets remember that from all the world. Theoreticaly there are only 5-10% people who knows pc parts . Other half. It runs? - buy! it looks good? - buy

true true and seeing how many laptop manufactuers are seemingly in Intel's pocket it makes even more sense.

 

[BSim500]

....but.....why...how....who would buy a PC today and go for Intel?

A budget / mid-range user who hasn't been able to buy an AMD chip under £280? Looking back over the past few years, Ryzen 1600 / 1600AF and 2600 were selling in the UK for £99 at one point. The 3600 hit £129. Meanwhile the 5600X (that already launched at double the price of the 3600) recently soared from £260-£280 to over £330 during the same time frame that the i5-10400F was at £125 (and in stock). The budget 3100 were permanently out of stock, 3300X is still vapourware in many regions, and it didn't help that AMD refused to sell the 4000 series APU's to end users during the same time they could have made an absolute killing with a new replacement for the out of stock 2-year old 2200G / 2400G / 3200G / 3400G APU's during the GPU shortages. In short, for 99% of people who aren't going to spend 2.5x the money for +2% performance in games (and for non-gamers don't care at all), AMD simply priced themselves out of the budget market for quite a few months.

 

[Chrispy_]

A budget / mid-range user who hasn't been able to buy an AMD chip under £280? Looking back over the past few years, Ryzen 1600 / 1600AF and 2600 were selling in the UK for £99 at one point. The 3600 hit £129. Meanwhile the 5600X (that already launched at double the price of the 3600) recently soared from £260-£280 to over £330 during the same time frame that the i5-10400F was at £125 (and in stock). The budget 3100 were permanently out of stock, 3300X is still vapourware in many regions, and it didn't help that AMD refused to sell the 4000 series APU's to end users during the same time they could have made an absolute killing with a new replacement for the out of stock 2-year old 2200G / 2400G / 3200G / 3400G APU's during the GPU shortages. In short, for 99% of people who aren't going to spend 2.5x the money for +2% performance in games (and for non-gamers don't care at all), AMD simply priced themselves out of the budget market for quite a few months.

This.

90% of people don't even need a 5600X.

Intel 10th Gen with heavy discount is far more appealing to the mass-market at 1/3rd the price and as far as they're concerned Windows, Minecraft, Chrome, and Spotify all run just fine.

 

[nguyen]

Lots of kids just dusted off their old Intel PC to play Steam games, summer holidays start in June

 

[Vya Domus]

You do know this is "Steam" survey BS

They're about as reliable as some of those Pew Pew surveys!

It's not just that, people are still pretending to not understand that we are looking at droves of mobile Intel chips that inflate these numbers. Intel could literally stop selling desktop chips entirely tomorrow and these statistics wouldn't budge for years to come in any significant manner.

 

[Valantar]

It's not just that, people are still pretending to not understand that we are looking at droves of mobile Intel chips that inflate these numbers. Intel could literally stop selling desktop chips entirely tomorrow and these statistics wouldn't budge for years to come in any significant manner.

Most likely, yeah. Though judging by clock speeds (rated base clock), the increase is almost entirely in the 2.3-2.69GHz range (both Windows and OSX have large gains in that range). In other words these are either H-SKUs or older, higher power mobile SKUs. Definitely not desktop chips, unless Xeon gaming suddenly became a thing.

 

[AnarchoPrimitiv]

It's not just that, people are still pretending to not understand that we are looking at droves of mobile Intel chips that inflate these numbers. Intel could literally stop selling desktop chips entirely tomorrow and these statistics wouldn't budge for years to come in any significant manner.

This sounds like the most plausible explanation me....when most people say "I'm going to buy a new computer", what they mean is a new laptop..... Most people don't even consider desktop and option anymore.

 

[persondb]

....but.....why...how....who would buy a PC today and go for Intel?

Dont get me wrong, im planning to go for Alderlake myself should that turn out to be worth a damn (its just a weird piece of tech for what we know so im interested)....but like if I had to get something now I would never ever go for Intel, thats just rediculous..(well unless the price is extremely agreable I guess).

Intel discounted parts are pretty competitive for the mid/low range, plus as others only a few are enthusiasts who know more in depth about those things.

Plus notebooks too, Intel is a lot more competitive there and in general has a lot more notebooks.

 

[Patr!ck]

This is the result of the 8 core Tiger Lake-H getting released last month. And let's be honest, it's a much better product than Cezanne-H. The mobile market is many times more important than the DIY space and many people are now discovering PCIe 4.0 SSDs on mobile thanks to Tiger Lake-H.

 

[ppn]

Intel Regains (a minuscule minute fraction of) CPU Market Share that it lost to AMD. that is journalism for you. making the elephant out of the fly, or is it just the trend that matter, ok ill give you that if the trend is steady 1.72% by month continuous growth, then ok. but it's not. it fluctuates, one month is a plus, another is a minus. falls within the statistical error of measurement.

Used to be 79% in 2020, hell it was 81% a few months back. and now it regained 1.72% compared to what??, last month.

 

[Valantar]

This is the result of the 8 core Tiger Lake-H getting released last month. And let's be honest, it's a much better product than Cezanne-H. The mobile market is many times more important than the DIY space and many people are now discovering PCIe 4.0 SSDs on mobile thanks to Tiger Lake-H.

"Discovering" PCIe 4.0 SSDs - but what do they actually bring to the table? Given that the speed difference between SATA and fast 3.0 NVMe (~6x peak speed) is barely noticeable, what difference does the ~2x increase to 4.0 actually make? I'd wager none at all, especially as most ordinary workloads never come close to utilizing even 3.0 peak speeds. So that "discovery" amounts to seeing a new bullet point on a marketing spec sheet and thinking "wow, 4 is higher than 3!"

Still, Tiger Lake-H is no doubt selling well - Intel has a good relationship with all laptop makers, and are good at marketing their products (read: spend tons of money on marketing). There's also no doubt a lot of people looking into gaming laptops due to the desktop GPU drought, in addition to the already large gaming laptop market. So while AMD no doubt has a bigger market share in mobile than previously, these laptops are no dobut selling well. Most of those CPUs also fall in the base clock frequency range where the increase is according to the survey.

 

[medi01]

Another "why you should ignore Steam Hardware Bazinga Numbers" demonstration.

 

[Chrispy_]

"Discovering" PCIe 4.0 SSDs - but what do they actually bring to the table? Given that the speed difference between SATA and fast 3.0 NVMe (~6x peak speed) is barely noticeable, what difference does the ~2x increase to 4.0 actually make? I'd wager none at all, especially as most ordinary workloads never come close to utilizing even 3.0 peak speeds. So that "discovery" amounts to seeing a new bullet point on a marketing spec sheet and thinking "wow, 4 is higher than 3!"

Still, Tiger Lake-H is no doubt selling well - Intel has a good relationship with all laptop makers, and are good at marketing their products (read: spend tons of money on marketing). There's also no doubt a lot of people looking into gaming laptops due to the desktop GPU drought, in addition to the already large gaming laptop market. So while AMD no doubt has a bigger market share in mobile than previously, these laptops are no dobut selling well. Most of those CPUs also fall in the base clock frequency range where the increase is according to the survey.

I'm with Valantar on this.

There have been plenty of well-documented blind A-B tests where people have to guess whether they're using a budget SATA SSD or a high-end NVMe SSDs. People genuinely can't tell the difference and the run-to-run variance in application load times, level loads, and system 'snappiness' is bigger than the actual average measured differences between SATA and PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives anyway.

The bottleneck is often not the storage, but the application or an internet DRM/licensing/content server you have no control over. Waiting 10% longer when the wait is only 1.5 seconds isn't enough to make a meaningful difference, and in laptops especially the potential for streaming huge files between two fast NVMe drives practically doesn't exist, the file transfer will happen at the speed of the slower source/destination drive, likely to be either spinning rust, an internet connection, or a USB flash drive in the case of a laptop.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

imo there is not a chance EVER of AMD getting above Intel on the steam survey of CPU use, not ever, however great people think AMD is or however better than Intel they might "seem" to be, it will never happen. /end

 

[BSim500]

There have been plenty of well-documented blind A-B tests where people have to guess whether they're using a budget SATA SSD or a high-end NVMe SSDs. People genuinely can't tell the difference and the run-to-run variance in application load times, level loads, and system 'snappiness' is bigger than the actual average measured differences between SATA and PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives anyway.The bottleneck is often not the storage, but the application or an internet DRM/licensing/content server you have no control over. Waiting 10% longer when the wait is only 1.5 seconds isn't enough to make a meaningful difference, and in laptops especially the potential for streaming huge files between two fast NVMe drives practically doesn't exist, the file transfer will happen at the speed of the slower source/destination drive, likely to be either spinning rust, an internet connection, or a USB flash drive in the case of a laptop.

100% true and that happened to me the other day. (Me starts Dishonored and it loads near instantly). My friend : "God damn that's fast. What NVMe 4.0 are you using?" (Me: Points to lowly MX500 SATA then points to client-less GOG offline installer version = no waiting on API client calls for online DRM checks and also points to -nostartupmovies command line switch that bypasses all the intro screens). "Oh... I didn't know that could make up such a difference..."

 

[medi01]

Still, Tiger Lake-H is no doubt selling well - Intel has a good relationship with all laptop makers, and are good at marketing their products (read: spend tons of money on marketing). There's also no doubt a lot of people looking into gaming laptops due to the desktop GPU drought, in addition to the already large gaming laptop market. So while AMD no doubt has a bigger market share in mobile than previously, these laptops are no dobut selling well. Most of those CPUs also fall in the base clock frequency range where the increase is according to the survey.

One of the reasons they are "selling so well" is that it is very hard to find an offering with AMD inside.
Situation is much worse if you try to find RDNA2 notebook.

 

[Valantar]

One of the reasons they are "selling so well" is that it is very hard to find an offering with AMD inside.
Situation is much worse if you try to find RDNA2 notebook.

Aren't there still just two announced RDNA2 notebooks? Given the chip shortage, neither of these are surprising. Intel is used to producing tons of CPUs after all, so even in a shortage they're starting from a baseline 4-5x higher than AMD. It stands to reason that AMD will be harder hit in such a situation. Notebooks will no doubt start trickling out over time, but we all know how Nvidia likes to (choke)hold onto their partners. Given that GPP is still in effect in China, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they were putting significant pressure on OEMs to take their time designing RX 6000-equipped laptops. Though of course there's a built-in advantage for Nvidia in previous designs actually existing, meaning OEMs don't have to make their motherboards from scratch. That's the advantage of being an incumbent quasi-monopoly.

 

[RedelZaVedno]

People have to ask why? Because of availability and price. AMD CPUs were in short supply and selling at inflated prices on top of Zen 3's higher MSRP just a few months ago. It really makes no sense to buy 5600X for 269€ when you can get 10600KF for 181€ atm. Does 5600X offer 33% better value for gamers? I'm sure 99,9% of users will not be able to see the difference in real life usage. Same story with 5800X Vs 10700F = 378€ Vs 256€. Sure 5800X is better, but 122€ better? I don't think so.