New figures from Mercury Research suggest that the struggling CPU market will pick up again in Q2 2023. Intel has gained three points of market share over AMD and appears to be leading the CPU supply.
Chris Szewczyk from PCGamer breaks down Mercury Research’s chart, pointing out that the three percentage points picked up by Intel coincide with a three-point drop for AMD. The chart shows that Intel is still strongly in the lead with 68.4% of the market share, a pretty high standard compared to AMD’s share of 31.6%.
Why is this important?
You can see in the chart above that AMD has fallen back 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 that AMD achieved with these CPUs was promising, but it looks like Intel will continue to dominate.
The CPU market appears to be recovering from a particularly dry spell, largely due to excess inventory. If you have warehouses full of stock, you don’t actually have to produce anymore. AMD’s console chips would no doubt decline as the shortage of consoles faded into the air, while Intel’s market growth can be attributed to steady sales of Chromebooks. This small boost is interesting because it comes from the lower end of the market, where AMD usually excels.
So as it stands, Intel continues to dominate the CPU market, which makes me concerned about the blue company’s stagnation of innovation. If the company controls the market, what motivates it to improve its products and improve the user experience?