Mercury Research published the results of a study confirming that AMD continues to gain market share in the x86 CPU sector, and that, as expected, the big loser is Intel. The data is very clear and easy to interpret, so let’s look at it directly.

During the first quarter of 2022, Sunnyvale recorded a market share of 27.7%and in the first quarter of 2023 its market share grew to a 34.6%. These numbers confirm that in just one year, AMD has reached market share in the x86 CPU sector increased by 6.9%.

In contrast, Intel’s market share in the same market increased from 72.3% during the first quarter of 2022 to 65.4% in the first quarter of 2023. This means a year-on-year decrease of 6.9%, the same number that AMD earned during that period. I think it’s pretty clear that the 6.9% that AMD grew was taken directly from Intel, a reality that matches what Intel’s CEO advanced back then.

It is important to note that this message contains sales data for all CPU types sold by both Intel and AMDas well as IoT (Internet of Things) and SoC solutions. With that in mind, the APUs Sunnyvale sells for the PS5, Xbox Series X-Series S, and Steam Deck should also be included, at least in theory.

No doubt about it AMD has been gaining a lot of success since the launch of the Zen architecture in 2017, and there is no doubt that this was an absolutely wise move on the part of the Lisa Su-led company, as it allowed it to come back and compete with Intel on a level that few of us could have imagined, ultimately bringing the Sunnyvale giant to a position where it was able to surpass Intel at all levels.

That turning point came with the arrival of Zen 3., which was the first architecture released by AMD in a decade to surpass Intel in both IPC, single-threaded and multi-threaded performance, as well as thermal efficiency and power consumption. Remember that when AMD released the Ryzen 9 5950X, equipped with 16 cores and 32 threads, the most powerful thing that Intel released was the Core i9-11900K, a chip with 8 cores and 16 threads, which also had a lower IPC.

Today, the two companies are pretty even, and rightly so Intel made a remarkable comeback with Alder Lake-S, and managed to strengthen its position with the Raptor Lake-S. We’ll see what happens with the next generations of both giants, but the important thing is that the competition between the two is fierce again, and that’s good for consumers.