Puget Systems, one of the best-established players in the workstation assembly and delivery market, has just released a "State of the CPU" report on the distribution of its AMD and Intel systems for June 2021, and it looks very good for AMD.
The last report, released in February of this year, had AMD at an already leading 59% of total systems sold, compared to Intel's 41% share. This June, AMD has reached the 60% share. While that may seem like a negligible gain, there's a deeper significance behind the numbers.
That deeper significance pertains to system and CPU availability. AMD has been placed between a rock and a hard place in the supply vs demand equation, with supply shortages affecting everything from its graphics cards to CPUs. Part of this is the fault of the pandemic, as it stretched supply chains to the breaking point. Another part pertains to TSMC's 7nm output and the need to supply not only AMD, but other customers as well. The final piece of the puzzle lays with AMD itself, who moved virtually all of its portfolio to TSMC's 7nm manufacturing process.
This means that AMD has had to provide for entire markets on a constrained, single node while sharing capacity with other customers. This includes current-gen consoles (with Xbox, for instance, achieving historic sales records last month), as well as system integrators across the supercomputing, workstation, business and personal computing fields. It's a lot of demand for too little supply. Compare that to Intel, who haven't faced any supply issues during this year due to its incredibly mature 14nm process over which it has full control, undercutting AMD and selling a CPU anywhere there's an AMD shortage.
If AMD could provide for those CPUs or GPUs without losing sales on the top end, it would. In this market, that 1% extra market share — and possibly much more than that — could have had easily been provided by Intel, if AMD was not be able to supply Puget with enough hardware. But AMD has been playing its cards well and it knows how important the lead here is for its professional market image.
Puget Systems further states that the 60-40 split in AMD's favor perfectly matches the company's current available configurations. It offers 32 AMD systems compared to Intel's 22, which in itself is a win for AMD. And looking at the historical delivery data from Puget reveals just how far AMD has come. In just two years, the company went from a <5% market share in June 2020 to its current 60%. It's a sight to behold, but AMD can't rest on its laurels. We've seen what happens when giants trip, and AMD can't afford as big a fall as Intel.
