The DIY CPU market has been AMD’s home turf since the launch of the Ryzen processors with the chipmaking swallowing large chunks of the market every quarter. However, since the advent of the Alder Lake lineup, Intel has been hitting back across all segments. 2021 was the first year in recent times that Intel actually ended with an overall gain in the desktop CPU market. The current year has also been going smoothly for Team Blue.
AMD made steady gains through the last quarter of 2021 (and Jan 2022), but Intel canceled most of those gains in one fell swoop last month. This can be largely attributed to the aggressive pricing of the 12th Gen CPUs, most notably the Core i7-12700K/12700 and the Core i5-12600K/12600. We found the $300 to be notably faster than the $449 Ryzen 9 5900X in a recent comparison. Regardless, AMD’s position in the desktop market (Windows) remains strong with over 30% of the client share.
Among Linux users, AMD saw a notable gain of +0.38%, consolidating over previous gains and pushing its overall share to 41.53%. This is the first time the two rivals are approaching the 50-50 market share in this segment.
In the GPU space, NVIDIA was the dominant player, pretty much eliminating AMD from the top-10 (even top-20). The GeForce RTX 3060 was the bestseller in March with a net share gain of +0.56%, making it the 7th most popular GPU among Steam gamers. The RTX 3070 was the second bestselling GPU, making it to the #11 spot in terms of the overall market share. These stats fall in line with NVIDIA’s claims that the Ampere lineup has been the company’s most successful architecture ever.
