AMD’s PC market share soars during the fourth quarter, thanks to Ryzen

If, like us, you’ve been impressed with AMD’s recent run of Ryzen products, you’re not alone: AMD’s market share has climbed to a point not seen since 2013.

According to AMD, the company’s market share in the desktop PC space climbed to 18.3 percent during the fourth quarter, up 2.4 percentage points from the same time a year ago. AMD’s mobile share for the same period now stands at 16.2 percent, an increase of 4 percentage points from a year ago, too. The numbers come from a report from Mercury Research, which confirmed AMD’s figures.

AMD

Because of the essentially zero-sum nature of the PC market, AMD’s gains come at the expense of Intel, which saw market share decreases of nearly the same amount. In desktop, Intel’s fourth-quarter share stands at 81.7 percent, and at 83.8 percent for mobile.

The third player, Zhaoxin (which uses Via’s technology) has a scant 0.1-percent share in the desktop CPU market, Mercury reports. All of Mercury’s numbers also exclude the impact of any IoT products, though that’s probably an unnecessary caveat in the desktop PC space.

“Desktop CPUs were up due to strong high-end gaming CPU demand, and also because Intel improved entry-level CPU supply during the quarter,” Mercury Research principal analyst and president Dean McCarron said in an email. “AMD had very strong growth in the ‘Matisse’ core Ryzen 3000 series, and in addition to the improved entry-level supply Intel had strong growth in [Core] i9. Much of the growth for both AMD and Intel happened at the very very top of the market for CPUs with the highest core counts.”

The mobile market was weaker, but saw growth at the top like desktop CPUs, McCarron added.

Intel does have something to cheer about, at least in the short term. For one thing, it controlled 95.5 percent of the X86 server market during the fourth quarter (although AMD stole about one point of market share, giving it 4.5 percent). AMD’s semi-custom business suffered short-term declines as the market awaits the next generation of gaming consoles, Mercury reported.