Yup, that's what happened at first, 2016 to 2020 shows a nice improvement.
After that they've had chip shortages, and I have no idea if the pandemic affected AMD differently. Also, desktop competition got a lot better since 2021. It took AMD 3 years to get back to where they once were
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That graph should both embarrass and motivate AMD. AMD really needs to look at prices as well as their position on 3D cache, as they are just too expensive, and more generally, lacking value especially when you look at the entire AM5 platform cost.
Intel will have more (inferior) cores than AMD in their chips very soon, so AMD with their 16 (superior) cores won't look so good from a
marketing point of view, and you just know Intel has some very dirty marketing lined up to make their products look better against AMDs, so as AMD seems to have stagnated with their push for more cores on the desktop, they WILL have to lower prices, and even think twice about pushing their 8 core parts as some kind of premium choice, as Intel will be offering more cores at a lower price.
For the record, I'm 100% sure that Zen 5 will be superior to anything Intel releases, but AMD's cache starved designs won't look good against Intel in gaming, which is what drives the consumer market.
It's time for AMD to stop messing around with the 3D cache band aid cash-grab, and just add more and better cache to the CPU itself, without glueing cache over the top of it, hindering performance from a thermal and clockspeed perspective, AMD also need to sort their awful memory controller out too. But AMD won't do that, as they are amateur, slightly naïve and are not cutthroat enough to ACTUALLY take Intel on and definitively beat them.
If I was AMD, I would simplify the lineup, and create only 2 product lines, Gaming and Creator/Productivity (Threadripper remains as HEDT). Ditch the 3D cache with the expensive manufacturing costs, and long time to market, as well as the consumer cash-grab associated with it, and lower prices.
I would push the 8 core version as my low-cost gateway drug entry point for gamers and offer just 2 CPU's to choose from, an 8 core and a 16 core premium gaming chip, with a fair price gap between them. When buying these 2 gaming CPU's I would include a voucher for a rebate on AMD graphics cards.
Then for the Creator/Productivity line I would create a low-cost budget 6 core CPU (from defective 8 core parts) aimed at Internet cafe's and people who only want a simple but performant low-cost computer.
Then a mid-range 12 core CPU, aimed at mid-range users for a bit of everything, gaming/productivity/content creation, made from die harvested defective 16 core parts.
Then a 16 core high-end productivity CPU, same as the 16 core gamer CPU but lower clocked.
I would sell these at a lower margin for a few years, take the hit until market share was showing good growth, (AMD has shown no real market share growth for years) and then I would slowly start increasing margin as I look back at Intel as I surpassed their market share.
I would also make moving to a quad-channel memory design a priority for AM6, which would support 32 core CPU's.