December wasn’t a very positive month for AMD in the PC gaming market if the recent Steam Hardware results are anything to go by. The company lost a sizable share in both the CPU and GPU markets, something that hasn’t happened in almost a year.
In the CPU segment, AMD lost 2%, the first drop in its share this year. As we had earlier reported, the company was consistently gaining 1-2% every month, primed to hit the 30% market share by mid-2021. Although Team Red will still likely hit that mark, this month’s results are pretty interesting.
This drop can be attributed to the shortage of the Ryzen 5000 CPUs. Although the new Zen 3 parts managed to snatch the gaming crown from Intel, supply has been tight, and retails that do have it, are selling the chips for double the prices.
The GPU market didn’t favor AMD either, with all 10 bestselling GPUs being NVIDIA products. The RTX 2060, followed by the 2070 were the most popular graphics cards among Steam users. Curiously, despite a severe shortage, the RTX 3080 managed to break into the list with a monthly gain of 0.24%, more than twice as much as last month. This means that the supply for NVIDIA’s Ampere cards is indeed improving. The only notable AMD card in the list was the Radeon RX 5600 XT with its share remaining static at 0.23%, roughly half as much as the RTX 3080.
With Intel priming to launch its 11th Gen Rocket Lake-S processors in late March, the coming months will be crucial for AMD. If the company wants to capitalize on this opportunity, it’ll have to ramp up Zen 3 production fast and make sure the market demand is met. (xanax generic alternatives)
