AMD announced its Zen 4 family at Computex 2022 last month. The notebook market is clearly becoming a priority as evident from the announcement of disaggregation of the high-performance and low-power lineups. Dragon Range will double the core count from 8 to 16 for high-end gaming and content creation laptops while Phoenix will focus on single-threaded and graphics performance with a further emphasis on power efficiency.
Meanwhile, the desktop lineup isn’t getting any core or thread hikes, opting for a frequency boost to over 5.5GHz instead. This is an obvious nod to gamers, one of the more lucrative segments of the business. Although the IPC and multi-threaded performance will see respectable gains of ~10% and ~40%, respectively, we expect Intel to win in the latter.
Market analyst JP Morgan expects the results of this shift to start showing by the end of this year. As per a report, AMD’s desktop CPU market will decline by 26% (in terms of revenue) in 2022, followed by another single-figure decline in 2023.
However, this doesn’t mean that the company will enter a period of regressing profits. The extra focus on the notebook segment is sure to net hefty earnings on account of the wider profit margins. In this regard, the analyst predicts a growth of 35% in AMD’s mobile CPU market (by revenue) this year. The next year, much like desktop, is expected to remain flat, but unit share should continue to grow.
