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As a cpu buyer, I'd like amd and intel to get stuck at 50-50 market share and fight tooth and nail by introducing cheaper and faster models every year. And maybe discover low power computing, although that's wishful thinking.
The upcoming Phoenix APUs from AMD are a game-changer for portable and handheld devices. Between 15 and 45W TDP, Zen4/RDNA3... They're slowly trickling out to thin and light laptops, but I can't wait to get them in the next Steam Deck killer.
You can set lower power limits for both AMD and Intel's chips to improve perf/watt. AMD benefits more than Intel when doing so.

Here's some more reading if you're interested: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17641/lighter-touch-cpu-power...

Indeed, ideally 3 companies to help ensure there's not some agreement to raise prices. Apple's largely not in the same market, but is pushing the edge when it comes to performance per watt, even shipping products gasp without fans.
I would prefer many competitors instead of a duopoly.

Do not forget ARM.

I agree with you, although I'd prefer to see (at least) a three way duke out between Intel, AMD, and ARM. I really don't think living in a world where there's (basically) only one CPU architecture and instruction set is going to be as beneficial as one in which there is competition on more than simply price and power consumption.
No, it is better for AMD to pull far ahead so that the next challenger is forced to come up with even greater innovation to steal market share. This is better than just having two large vendors locked in a back and forth game of one up manship and incremental innovation.
Screw that; I want them to dump x86 altogether and move to ARM, or maybe come up with something even better, to compete with Apple's M2. Why are we stuck with this shitty old ISA from the 1970s?
These is missing something. Looking at just the Q4 2022 numbers:

AMD Desktop CPU Market Share 18.6%

AMD Mobility CPU Market Share 16.4%

AMD Server CPU Market Share 17.6%

AMD Overall x86 CPU Market Share 31.3%

What's causing the bump from 16%-18% share to 31% in the avgs?

Are they including game consoles in the x86 market share?

I reached out to Mercury Research (the company whose research is being quoted) and the articles are missing some clarifying information.

The overall CPU Market Share number also includes both IoT and SoC numbers which are not included in the other numbers and in which Intel's shipments have declined substantially while AMDs SoC products (including game consoles) are making up a large number. This is what's responsible for the disparity.

They also added that the data was distributed with a helpful clarifying note the news articles are mostly omitting:

* Please keep in mind that due to the inventory corrections taking place, that the statistics and share movements reported here in the past few quarters -- and likely for the first half of 2023 -- are more reflective of the suppliers differing in the depth and timing of their inventory corrections, rather than indicating sales-out share of the PC market, which is something we probably won't know with any accuracy until late in 2023. *

I understand that the 3 first statistics include non x86 CPUs
The Intel not making chips for any gaming console I'd imagine
I assumed it's due to their server chips being way more efficient, powerful, and cheaper than the equivalent parts from Intel.
To give you some context: before Zen, their high was 25.3% in the fourth quarter of 2006. This was the year Intel shipped the first Core CPUs and in 2007 AMD shipped the K10 architecture. Their pre-Zen low came in at 11.6% in the first quarter of 2016 but even with Zen the turnaround was not immediate as you can see in the 10.6% in Q3 2018.

And while their discrete GPU market share is in decline -- and since they bought ATI they never had the lead, indeed it never went above 40% https://overclock3d.net/gfx/articles/2022/11/29160939924l.jp... it seems they still gain significant benefits from having them by selling a lot of APUs, especially in consoles.

Not sure how long that'll play out. The 13th gen have barely been integrated in stuff and they seem to, at least on single thread, smash AMD in the price/performance ranking. 13700K is a beast of a CPU for not much money. Also the next two gens of Intel stuff is very different. At least AMD are giving them an ass kicking which they deserve.

My PC has a 12400 in it which actually realistically kicks my M1 Pro MBP in the teeth on some things which is embarrassing as it's a junk ass end Lenovo desktop machine that cost <$500.

We live in interesting and exciting times.

Keep in mind the prices are changing quickly as of late. AMD brought out the 7700, 7900, and 7950 (non-x) that are cheaper, generate less heat, and include a fan. There's also been pretty heavy discounts on the 7700x/7900x/7950x AMD chips as well. DDR5 and Motherboard prices for the am5 chips are dropping as well. Microcenter is even including 8GB free with a CPU purchase. The price/perf of the AM5 platform has changes quite a bit in the last month.

Intel does win some benchmarks, but often at substantially higher power consumption. The AMD chips run cooler and even significantly reducing the TDP down to 65 watts often has a single digit percentage slow down.

>The 13th gen have barely been integrated in stuff and they seem to, at least on single thread, smash AMD in the price/performance ranking.

Costs more to run, costs more to make, runs hotter and louder, by "smash" we're usually talking single digit performance gulfs, and performance is worse in a fairly broad amount of applications and where Intel's performance IS better it often is in an application where you would never be able to tell the difference without measurement tools.

The 12400 "kicking the m1 in the teeth" is likely due more to software optimisation than the 12400 actually being meaningfully better.

Your like of Intel's products as a consumer isn't really a reflection of their competitiveness. The only reason you're willing to buy their products at all is that Intel is cutting their margins to the bone whereas AMD is making stacks on every sale. Intel has had the best single core performance for eons and that hasn't saved them from their decline.

MBP is the only computer I can run intense workloads at high performance while it remains completely silent. I’ve been waiting for such a machine for a long time. When intel can match that they’ll have my attention.
Apple to oranges. 12400 has a TDP of 65W while M1 has 13.8W. What can a 15W Intel do? Not much
> My PC has a 12400 in it which actually realistically kicks my M1 Pro MBP in the teeth on some things which is embarrassing as it's a junk ass end Lenovo desktop machine that cost <$500.

And if you factor in power consumption at EU prices?

All you said is relatively true but ignores better power performance for AMD.

"Smashing" ST performance while consuming 150w is not an ideal situation for anyone but gamers and benchmarkers.

AMD has the edge on performance per watt though.
I have a 12400 and a M1 Air. The Air is faster on pretty much anything I've tried, even most benchmarks.
Most stuff is multi threaded now, even games.
We bought a $9000 single socket AMD (2.4 GHz) 40 core server from Dell and a $27,000 dual socket Intel (2.8 GHz) 100 core server from Dell.

The AMD server is at full load, using around 150W whereas the Intel server idles at 450W doing absolutely nothing and pushes up to 700W if we load it up.

In hindsight, I regret not just buying 3 of the AMD servers for the same price. I had this fallacy that the Intel server would be magically more energy efficient, but that has turned out to be FUD and baloney.

NB Power usage measured at the wall socket with voltage and current monitored PDUs.

From an investor perspective, AMD was a fantastic story due to Intel's 10nm process slip. AMD also got the jump on MCM which is arguably the most disruptive innovation in the mix.

I think the pendulum has begun to swing the other way. Intel is catching up and surpassing in some important areas already.

I've held positions both in AMD and Intel over the years. Right now I am long INTC.

What would be even better than this duopoly would be three or more players. I was disappointed when Windows Mobile folded as look what we are stuck with now. Sucks that markets like this devolve into only two major players like consoles, mobile OSes, CPUs, GPUs, commercial aircraft, rail freight....sigh.
Intel stumbled badly on their new semiconductor fab development. Their next generation fabrication plants have been delayed for years and they are losing badly to TSMC, which makes AMD's chips. It would be interesting for someone to tell the story of why they failed where before they had cranked out new fabs process technology like clockwork.
As an Intel fanboy, I am sad to see my favorite team beaten by the competitor. I am holding out hope that their next processor will return them to the crown of price and price/performance. I am currently rocking an i7 3770k iMac 27” and I am ready to upgrade.
Hey Intel, try this:

1) pay more for talent than anyone else.

2) treat your engineering staff amazingly well

3) watch your business completely turn around in two years

How does does AMD/Intel stack up against ARM with something like Amazon's Graviton instances?

It seems /a lot/ of the people I know are moving from Intel/AMD to ARM, I suspect the move is bigger than I expect. So I'm wondering if that's chipping away at Intel/AMDs market share.

AMD also has chipsets that are making their way onto motherboards. Video, PCI, USB, etc. We had a problem with an HID device of ours that would work fine with the ubiquitous Intel USB chipsets for the last 10 years, but didn't work properly with the AMD USB chipset on a new laptop.

So Intel is losing chipset share, too.

Great job AMD, now do RISC V so Apple's M1 can get some competition.
This seems like a weird metric, CPU market share seems to only include actual drop in CPUs that go with motherboards, right? If that’s the case, wouldn’t the overall CPU market be shrinking as we get things like the M-Series MacBooks and Macs coming out?

To me, the more interesting question is what does the overall market of compute devices that can be used in a fashion similar to what AMD and Intel sell (being charitable and leaving out mobile) look like and what percentage of that market do AMD and Intel make up? Has the overall market grown? Is it growing faster overall than the laptop/desktop/server/hpc space that intel and AMD are catering to?

Watching an Asianometry episode, I was surprised to see that Intel contributed significantly to ASML's development of EUV.

But I also heard somewhere that Intel, until recently, refused to buy ASML's EUV machines. Trying to go it mostly alone on EUV lithography.

Are both of these facts really true?

Seems insane that Intel would help ASML develop EUV and then watch competitors buy the machines and reap the benefits.

AMD should give desktop CPUs more PCIE lanes and memory channels.
I always bought intel because whenever I bought AMD I regretted it.

Now however Intel has low power cpu cores and high power cpu cores and I feel cheated. AMD has all full power cores.

If AMD sells SoC on standard MB sizes, they’d definitely take the gaming market. They’re getting impeded by MB manufacturers price gouging.
I wish this was the case on the GPU side too. Nvidia is playing by their rules and everybody follows.
Every possible forum on the Internet is biased towards AMD. Apparently HN is no exception.
This shows how dangerous it is when a real tech expert becomes the ceo of a large company
holy cow that's a big chunk of marketshare.
When are AMD 3nm part expected? Mid 2024?
This is good for competition sake, that's for sure. But the PC market will continue to suffer under these missed opportunities:

- DRAM price fixing and limiting: we should probably have 4x more memory or more for the price we pay these days

- SSD price fixing and limiting: we should probably have 2x more SSD capacity per cost

- ARM in PC is still being foot-dragged. I have no faith that Intel can make an M1/M2 competitor or killer, but AMD, Samsung, and Qualcomm should be able to do it. I mean, Amazon/Aws have their own ARM chips.

- compact low power PCs like raspberry-pi type form factors (or the PC stick, or similar) are ripe for the taking. I have tower case PCs from 5-10 years ago that should be replaceable with a 3"x3" cube design, or imagine a base power supply where you take some sort of FrameworkPC-style headless notebook blades and they sit vertically on the base. The ports all face you. If it was a great multiple-4k display super-KVM, heck yes.

- AMD, Qualcomm, and Samsung should be pushing a linux desktop initiative. Microsoft and Windows are really holding back PC units with their awful OS releases. The disaster of Windows 8 has not really been fixed, and they frankly don't care. A better-than-OSX linux is out there and it is low hanging fruit.

The PC market is so ripe for major innovation. It is stuck with crappy motherboard and case form factors.

Intel has ALWAYS sucked at platform leadership. AMD (and/or Samsung and/or Qualcomm) don't have to be. I really hope if AMD hits 50% at some point they can push more platforms to create new markets and segments for their processors and graphics chips. Intel is beyond saving, they have never understood platforms, software, and their management is moribund in penny pinching and monopoly rent extraction.

Apple still treats the PC market as an afterthought. They have the moxie and hardware/software to do something, but they aren't open enough.

Qualcomm might simply be too OEM-focused to show this kind of leadership, and they'd need a major ARM PC CPU, and that is five years off.

Samsung is too samsung ecosystem focused. They are not open enough.

AMD is, for better or worse, the one with the market position and innovation ability to create new PC opportunities. They don't have the subservient history to Microsoft. They have more EU/world focus, and those markets should be interested/open to non-Microsoft computing.

And that is the path to long term market relevance. Intel may still come back, and they have pseudomonopoly powers and relationships with big business to relegate AMD. AMD needs to continue execution in x86, but do what I described: ARM/Apple M1/M2 competitor, Linux/Steamdeck desktop OS initiatives, and push more revolutionary small form factor computing platforms. It will hedge against Intel's monopoly powers and open new markets that Intel has shown utter inability to compete in historically.

And frankly, with the "Moores Law" family of macro-trends stalling more and more, the path to more CPU and GPU sales isn't just a faster better chip. It's getting chips into more packages, places, and uses that people currently have them. Form factors and packaging are going to make MORE of a difference for upgrading. Right now, if I could get some sort of fancy framework-style compact notebook-that-is-a-thin-but-upgradable-desktop computer in a neat package, that's a much more compelling buy than a machine that has, what, maybe real world 10% PERCEPTIBLE performance improvement over something from 5 years ago?

Realistically this should have been in full swing with the COVID boom. Not sure if the penny pinchers will allow such "radical" investment (the non-ARM initiatives might take, what a billion a year froma 26 billion a year company?)

Such a misleading title.

> [...] AMD now has a market share of 31.3% (up from 28.5% in Q4 2021) versus Intel's 68.7% (down from 71.5%)

That's not "grabbing over 30%" in my book. It's grabbing 2.8%.

I really need to upgrade my personal media server but both companies' CPUs just use way too much power. It's kind of ridiculous. Yes, they're fast but power hungry as heck. Makes my dual xeons I run now look energy efficient.