AMD Comes Roaring Back: Analyzing Five Years of CPU Sales at Mindfactory

It's well known at this point that Ryzen is fueling AMD's rise against Intel in the do-it-yourself PC market. We recently reported on the effect Ryzen 3000 had on AMD's sales at Mindfactory, one of Germany's most popular internet retailers, and now reddit user ingebor (who has compiled all of the Mindfactory data we've covered thus far) has charted sales data over the past five years that provides an incredible overview of AMD's rise since 2017.

In the middle of 2014, Intel sold ~12,000 CPUs compared to AMD's roughly 4,000 processors, giving Intel a hefty 75% control of the market and leaving AMD with a measly 25%. Unfortunately for AMD, things got even worse in 2015 (as many are aware) because of two major reasons: firstly, AMD was still on its 2012 architecture Vishera, which powered second-gen FX CPUs (like the 8350), and secondly, Intel was soon to release its Skylake CPUs fabricated on the then-new 14nm process. The chips clocked rather well, dropped into more modern motherboards, and introduced DDR4 memory support.

Vishera, having been defeated already by Ivy Bridge and Haswell in 2012 and 2013, provided no challenge to Skylake-powered 6th-gen CPUs, whose main competitor was not AMD's FX series, but Intel's own 4th-gen CPUs. The results were disastrous for AMD, which immediately fell well below 20% share and perhaps even dipped as low as 15% share at the beginning of 2016. The gap appeared to close in 2015 and 2016, right up until the end of 2016 when Intel put AMD back below 20% share once again thanks to increasingly good sales.

However, this victory was somewhat short-lived for Intel, because, as we all know, AMD had been cooking something up for many years: the Zen microarchitecture.

Ryzen launched in early 2017, and it didn't take long for AMD to reverse Intel's gains. By mid-2017 AMD had achieved parity with Intel in terms of market share and even revenue; Ryzen 1000-series processors became the most popular chips at Mindfactory. AMD was just about to overtake Intel outright when the 8th-gen (Coffee Lake) CPUs launched. Coffee Lake provided some reprieve for Intel, and 8th-gen CPUs quickly slowed down AMD's momentum and took back the lead in terms of both sales and revenue. However, it wasn't long before AMD gave its response in the form of the Ryzen 2000 chips based on Pinnacle Ridge.

Despite being a modest refresh of Zen, Pinnacle Ridge propelled AMD into first place. Despite Coffee Lake's impressive performance, it took almost no time at all for AMD to soar into first place in sales. Near the end of 2018, AMD had two-thirds of the market despite the Coffee Lake refresh, spearheaded by the eight-core Core i9-9900K having launched around this time. AMD also managed to take the revenue crown, but just barely because Ryzen 2000 was mostly popular due to its lower pricing than Ryzen 1000-series processors, a move that proved to be crucial to success.

When we look at the recent sales data on Matisse, the architecture that powers Ryzen 3000, it seems like AMD has the best of both world's right now. Unlike with Pinnacle Ridge, both sales and revenue are very high. The volume ramp might actually be the most surprising aspect; it took Ryzen 2000 half a year to sell as many CPUs per day as Ryzen 3000 did the day it launched. Ryzen 2000 remains popular, however, landing just below Ryzen 3000 chips.

Ryzen 3000's average selling price is also an interesting figure: From 2014 to early 2017, AMD CPUs sold for 100 Euros on average, and Intel CPUs retailed for about 250. When Ryzen 1000 launched, AMD's average sale price also shot up to around 250 Euros, and then slowly declined to around 170 Euros until Ryzen 3000 launched. The new Ryzen chips brought AMD back up to about 250 again (though it is falling close to 200 now). Intel, on the other hand, has been increasing its average selling price since late 2017, from 250 to 300 Euros today, with a peak of 350 Euros in late 2019 due to the Coffee Lake refresh.

Though this data might not reflect the sales data of other retailers of other countries or even other German retailers, it's highly likely other retailers are seeing higher than normal AMD sales and lower than normal Intel sales, even if Intel is still the market leader. We're very excited to see these interesting developments in the CPU space, competition is good for the consumer,  and we're looking forward to the next round of competition as Intel and AMD are both poised to make big launches in both the HEDT and mainstream segments before the end of the year.