AMD’s CPU Market Share Grows to Almost 30% as Intel Falters, Ryzen Chips Record Highest Gain in Over 3 Years [Mercury Research]

Areej Syed

August 11, 2022

Mercury Research has published its quarterly report on the state of the x86 CPU market which includes the desktop, notebook, and server segments. Interestingly, AMD continued to gain market share across both the desktop and notebook processor markets, amid falling PC sales. The chipmaker’s desktop CPU share rose to 20.6%, up from 18.3% at the end of the previous quarter (Via: Tomshardware). This is the largest gain for Team Red in the desktop market since the last quarter of 2018 when it grew by nearly 3%. AMD’s desktop chip share expanded by 2.3% quarter-over-quarter and 3.5% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2022.

	2Q22	1Q22	4Q21	3Q21	2Q21	1Q21	4Q20
AMD Desktop Unit Share	20.6%	18.3%	16.2%	17.0%	17.1%	19.3%	19.3%
Quarter over Quarter / Year over Year (pp)	+2.3% / +3.5%	+2.1 / -1.0	-0.8 / -3.1	-0.1 / -3.1	-2.3 / -2.1	+0.1 / +0.7	-0.8 / +1.0

Moving to the notebook market, the Ryzen mobile offerings once again delivered strong results, swelling by 2.3% quarter-over-quarter and a rather impressive 4.8% year-over-year. Lisa Su and Co. now control approximately 25% of the notebook CPU market. This is the largest figure ever attained by AMD, highlighting the strong growth trend since the introduction of the Zen family back in 2017.

	2Q22	1Q22	4Q21	3Q21	2Q21	1Q21	4Q20	3Q20	2Q20	1Q20
AMD Mobile Unit Share	24.8%	22.5%	21.6%	22.0%	20.0%	18.0%	19%	20.2%	19.9%	17.1%
Quarter over Quarter / Year over Year (pp)	+2.3% / +4.8%	+0.9 / +4.4	-0.4 / +2.6	+2.0 / +1.8	+1.9 / +0.01	-1.0 / +1.1	-1.2 / +2.8	+0.3 / +5.5	+2.9 / +5.8	+0.9 / +3.2

The server market demonstrates similar sentiments. AMD’s Epyc offerings continued to outmaneuver Intel’s dated Xeon lineup, attaining ~14% market, up from just over a percent in 2018. The second quarter of 2022 recorded the best ever quarter of the Red server team. This high-margin segment saw AMD grow its presence by 2.3% QoQ and 4.8% YoY.

Overall, this data puts AMD’s x86 CPU market share at ~28%, 2.1% higher than the last quarter and a healthy 7% more than the same period last year. This is the largest (YoY) gain recorded by the chipmaker’s CPU portfolio in forever. The previous high was back in the third quarter of 2022 when it grew by 6.6% YoY. It’ll be interesting to see if Intel gains any market share later this year with the Raptor Lake and Sapphire Rapids-SP launch. Both these lineups focus on core counts with single-threaded performance gains taking a backseat (quite literally with SPR) and the gaming crown likely staying with AMD.