(Alex Kraus/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Team Red is on a roll: AMD’s share of the desktop CPU market has increased by nearly 10 percentage points from a year ago, according to new stats.
On Friday, chip tracking firm Mercury Research reported that AMD’s desktop CPU shipments reached a 28.7% share in Q3, up from 19.2% a year ago.
Conversely, rival Intel saw its desktop CPU shipments for x86 processors drop 9.6 percentage points for 71.3% share of the market.
(Credit: Mercury Research)The numbers show that Intel still dominates the desktop CPU arena. But its grip on the market is loosening following a tough year when the company has been laying off 15% of its workforce to control costs amid declining demand for its chips.
In addition, AMD might close out 2024 with a strong fourth quarter. On Thursday, the company launched the gaming-focused Ryzen 7 9800X3D desktop chip, which quickly sold out across US retailers. Benchmarks of the 9800X3D also show the chip often beating Intel’s newly released Core Ultra 9 285K desktop chip in PC gaming.
As for Intel, the company’s reputation among PC builders took a major blow this summer when the company admitted its 13th and 14th generation desktop processors can suffer from a voltage bug that can damage the chips. In response, Team Blue has extended the warranties of the processors and pledged to replace affected CPUs with fresh ones.
Intel also says the voltage bug doesn’t affect the newly released Arrow Lake desktop processors or other product lines. But even so, some PC builders have been telling consumers to avoid buying from Intel. On the bright side, Intel still has a strong hold over the notebook chip market with a 77.7% share against AMD’s 22.3% in Q3, according to Mercury Research.
(Mercury Research)"Mobile CPU share moves also favored AMD, but were considerably smaller than in desktop due to Intel seeing a smaller impact from inventory adjustments in the mobile segment and having low but positive growth," Mercury Research President Dean McCarron said in an email. "Both Intel and AMD saw significant ramps of newer mobile products (Meteor Lake for Intel and Hawk Point for AMD) in the quarter, and both had new AI-enabled products, Lunar Lake for Intel and Strix Point for AMD, ship in small numbers."