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Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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