AMD sparked great expectations in 2019, especially because of the third generation of Ryzen and the new navigation charts. AMD could not catch up with the competition (AMD lost 5% of the GPU market in the second quarter), but its CPUs are a different story: AMD is becoming a much stronger competitor in this market.
According to Steam’s monthly hardware survey, 20% of users already use AMD processors. Looking at the files from these surveys, it’s easy to see that AMD’s peaks occurred every time they launched a new line of Ryzen processors. In January 2018, the number of AMD CPU users was only 8%, but by June they had doubled their audience to 16%. This temporary phase coincided with the production of second-generation Ryzens.
From June 2018, the figure remained stable until July 2019, when AMD recorded a 2% increase in users of its processors. This figure remained stable until November when they managed to overcome the 20% user limit. This also coincides with the launch of a generation of Ryzen, this time the third generation.
The number of cores per CPU is also an interesting statistic. The biggest percentage change in November was in 6-core processors such as the Ryzen 5 3600 / 3600X with almost 1.5 percent compared to October 2019. Unfortunately, the survey does not break down these statistics in verses from Intel vs. AMD, which would be good to know considering that Intel also has 6-core processors such as the cheap i5-9400F, which also has good sales.
Finally, as far as GPU usage is concerned, AMD holds 15% of the market. The RX 580 and 570 are still the most popular, while the new RX 5700 XT appears quite low in the rankings. Perhaps the next generation of Radeon cards will achieve the results Ryzen has achieved.