AMD's desktop CPU share passes Intel's for first time in 15 years | Hacker News Reader

AMD's desktop CPU share passes Intel's for first time in 15 years

techspot.com

How are these numbers calculated? According to the linked Passmark page[0]:

> This graph showing AMD and Intel market share is made up of thousands of PerformanceTest benchmark results and is updated daily.

> This graph counts the baselines submitted to us during these time period and therefore is representative of CPUs in use rather than CPUs purchased.

Since this is a benchmarking site, enthusiasts are probably overrepresented. I'm positive that there are more Intel CPUs being used in desktops than AMD.

[0] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/market_share.html

Aye, and while still not the whole picture, the Steam Hardware Survey[1] reports AMD as down from August.

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/

There's also a massive surge of simplified chinese users in the same month, along with a small increase in previous gen GPUs[1], so I suspect it has more to do with more older builds being sampled than intel gaining marketshare.

[1] If you check gpu market share for windows, the usage share for many nvidia 10xx, 16xx, 20xx series gpus went up. The first two are out of production years ago, and the last was out of production early/mid last year.

Guessing that people who want AMD are waiting for the 5000s to become more available and not buying as many 3000s, and/or "giving up" and buying Intel.

I'm guessing if the numbers are accurate, it might have to do with the supply of Zen 2 and earlier drying up for some reason. I've been looking at parts for customer builds and the market is a barren desert.

Yeah agreed; also, how often do people do benchmarks?

Me personally, I only bench around when the build is finished and not much after that; maybe bench again only if there's some significant hardware/software change (software change example being video driver that improves performance etc)

So, if passmark says "This graph counts the baselines submitted to us during these time period", then it probably mostly reflect new builds only. Which is still a significant data point, showing lots of AMD uptake (by enthusiasts), but not what the Techspot headline says/implies.

The headline is so misleading that I'm flagging the submission.

Yeah, passmark users have more AMD share would be a better title.

German distributor Mindfactory tells a similar story. I think I've came across some others telling the same, but didn't follow up, because different country, so not relevant to me. Anyways, when available they sell ZENs like crazy!

Totally agree that enthusiasts are overrepresented, but that seems like a leading indicator, at least in the performance and gaming market (which is a growing portion of the overall desktop market).

Perhaps a bigger share of a declining market. IDC forecast that 2020 desktop sales would be down about 17% while notebook sales rose about 26%. While many companies still use Wintel PCs for employees who are (normally) always at their desks, many others increasingly have standardized on notebooks even if not everyone needs one.

The trend looks good for AMD in that case. Intel can't compete on performance or efficiency for mobile chips, so it's just a matter of time before companies start shifting to AMD laptops in greater numbers. Especially since Intel still hasn't been able to demonstrate anything matching AMD.

AMD can't possibly overtake Intel until the mass market PC makers switch to AMD. Have any done so yet?

HP and Dell offer AMD laptops and desktops.

AMD is selling processors faster than they can make them.

Faster than TSMC can make them.

I applaud AMD for all they've been doing, but despite it all, Intel has the apparent advantage because AMD is bottlenecked on TSMC. AMD is competing with themselves, Apple, Nvidia, etc for foundry time. That doesn't seem like a good place to be at, even if they hold the technology advantage.

I am cautiously predicting Intel will remain the market leader indefinitely unless AMD finds a way to remedy the bottleneck.

yes, I think that is the bear point in the "Intel is doomed" analysis. I think at what point would the market/demand be financially worthwhile for another company to put up with the upfront costs of building a fab to compete w/ Samsung/TSMC?

Also, how many of the Ryzen units (and nVidia) are being scooped up by bots?

I think AMD is stuck. When a fab costs 10-20 billion and you're faced with companies as entrenched as TSMC and Samsung, it's going to take an entity fully backed by government money to be able to compete on the same level. The most likely candidate is China, since no other government is interested in investing money for long-term benefits other than them. Haven't they been buying up a lot of talent out of Taiwan in recent years? It's just a matter of time, imo.

> Also, how many of the Ryzen units (and nVidia) are being scooped up by bots?

Why does it matter?

What a crap AMD has overturn Intel for nearly 3 years!

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