AMD vs Intel war isn't over as Team Blue claws back market share

(Image credit: Intel)

New figures from Mercury Research suggest the struggling CPU market may be on the uptick in the second quarter of 2023. Intel has gained three points of market share over AMD and seems to be leading CPU shipments.

Chris Szewczyk from PCGamer breaks down the graph from Mercury Research and points out that the three percentage points that have been picked up by Intel coincide with a three-point drop for AMD. The graph shows that Intel is still leading strong with 68.4% of the market share, a pretty high standard compared to AMD’s 31.6% share.

Mercury Research has quarterly breakdowns of the CPU markets, including the x86 CPU market. — (Image credit: Venture Beat)

Why does this matter?

You can see on the graph above that AMD has dropped back down to the market share it had around this time last year, which doesn’t bode well for the longevity of the hype surrounding its Ryzen CPUs. The increase in market share AMD had achieved with these CPUs was promising, but it seems like Intel will continue to dominate.

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The CPU market seems to be recovering from a particularly dry spell, largely a result of excess inventory. If you’ve got warehouses full of stock, you don’t really need to produce more. AMD’s console chips were bound to decline as the console shortage faded into the ether, while Intel’s market growth can be attributed to steady Chromebook sales. This little boost is interesting as it comes from the low-end area of the market, which is usually where AMD excels.

So, as it stands Intel continues to dominate the CPU market, which does lead me to worry about innovation stagnation from the blue company. If the company controls the market, what motivates it to better its products and improve user experience?

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Muskaan is TechRadar’s UK-based Computing writer. She has always been a passionate writer and has had her creative work published in several literary journals and magazines. Her debut into the writing world was a poem published in The Times of Zambia, on the subject of sunflowers and the insignificance of human existence in comparison. Growing up in Zambia, Muskaan was fascinated with technology, especially computers, and she's joined TechRadar to write about the latest GPUs, laptops and recently anything AI related. If you've got questions, moral concerns or just an interest in anything ChatGPT or general AI, you're in the right place. Muskaan also somehow managed to install a game on her work MacBook's Touch Bar, without the IT department finding out (yet).