AMD has been making a return to the DIY PC space ever since the Zen microarchitecture launched 2-3 years back. However, with the launch of the Matisse chips (Ryzen 3000), the company has been on the front foot, forcing Intel to drop prices and comment on team red’s Ryze. Out of all the global markets, the European markets especially Germany have proved to be most susceptive to AMD’s campaign. In the past year or so, the German market has seen Intel’s shares plummet to an all-time low. The data we have is from one of the country’s largest retailers, Mindfactory. We’ve been following the company’s stats over the past 6 months as AMD has clawed its way back as the leading CPU manufacturer.
AMD starting gaining a foothold with the launch of the 1st and 2nd Gen Ryzen processors, but with the release of the 7nm parts, the company saw a sudden (and expected) surge in sales. In Jun, AMD held on to approximately 65-58% of the CPU market in Germany, but in July as the Matisse chips hit the market, their share exploded to ~80% and hasn’t dropped below 77% ever since.
More than the number of sales, with the launch of the Ryzen 3000 parts, AMD’s revenue has significantly grown. The main problem with the 2nd Gen Ryzen chips was that the gaming performance wasn’t up to the mark. And as the launch of the 3rd Gen Ryzen series drew near, most retailers started slashing the prices of the older products to clear inventory.
With the new product stack, AMD can sell their chips on price parity with Intel and get a hefty boost in revenue which is exactly what we’re seeing. Till June, the average selling price of an AMD part was below 200 Euros while Intel’s average was way above at almost 287 Euros (mainly their higher-end Coffee Lake-S parts). With 3rd Gen Ryzen, AMD’s average CPU price has climbed up to 214 Euros. Still lower than Intel’s but pretty solid when you take into account the number of CPUs sold (and Intel’s pricing policies over the years).
On AMD’s side, the Ryzen 5 3600 and the Ryzen 7 3700X are the bestselling CPUs and for good reason. The former performs more or less on par with the Core i7-8700K while the latter challenges the Core i9-9900K in content creation and multi-threaded workloads at half the price.
Tracing the history of these age-old rivals, we can see that ever since the Bulldozer based CPUs from AMD came to the market, the company began to lose prominence to the point of bankruptcy. Then came Zen in early 2017, and there was a steady growth in the company’s shares and finally this year in July, with the Zen 2 parts AMD started giving Intel a run for its money in every space from gaming to workstation and even servers. The rest is history.
Further reading: