AMD Rises To 25% Market Share on Steam Survey

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By Aaron Klotz
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AMD Focusing Zen 3 To Be Gaming-Centric CPUs

(Image credit: AMD)

Lisa Su continues to achieve win after win in the CPU market arena, with Steam's Hardware Survey now reporting a 25% market share for AMD processors, with that figure growing every month at a rate of 1%. Now on the brink of a new CPU launch, AMD is decidedly pushing its new Ryzen 5000 series CPUs as gaming CPUs first, something AMD has never done.

AMD CPUs have been notoriously disadvantaged in the gaming space vs Intel over the past decade. AMD pushed to get multi-core popular in early 2011, with the Bulldozer architecture. It wasn't until 2017 with 1st Gen Ryzen that AMD began making a comeback. They weren't great at gaming, but AMD's focus to bring both high core counts and good IPC to its CPUs allowed them to start gaining back market share, especially from PC enthusiasts. Now with today's current Ryzen 3000 CPUs, AMD is going toe-to-toe with Intel in gaming benchmarks for the first time ever since 2006, almost beating Intel's Core CPUs.

If AMD's new Zen 3 chips deliver on the promise of high gaming performance, we could see a massive swing in market share over to AMD. We already see AMD making a dent in Intel's market share with notebooks, if they can beat Intel in the gaming race, they'll have all the firepower they need to dominate the consumer space as a whole.

Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Freelance News Writer

Aaron Klotz is a freelance writer for Tom’s Hardware US, covering news topics related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Shadowclash10
    Oh. Interesting. 1% every month is pretty good.
    Reply
  • JamesSneed
    This is going to get interesting. AMD's Zen3 should be a beast. I do wonder if AMD will pull up the Zen3/RDNA APU designs to come earlier next year. Fun times having competition back.
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    Shadowclash10 said:
    Oh. Interesting. 1% every month is pretty good.

    Better than good. If you think about it people now replace systems about once every 5 years now (60 months) Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm working off memory.

    That means roughly 1.66% of people replace their system every month. If AMD is capturing 1% of that, AMD has captured ~60% of the new PC Market (1/1.66). Compared to Intel's stranglehold over the years and the number of fabs Intel has, this is huge.
    Reply
  • Siusiujuju
    digitalgriffin said:
    Better than good. If you think about it people now replace systems about once every 5 years now (60 months) Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm working off memory.

    That means roughly 1.66% of people replace their system every month. If AMD is capturing 1% of that, AMD has captured ~60% of the new PC Market (1/1.66). Compared to Intel's stranglehold over the years and the number of fabs Intel has, this is huge.

    Not exactly "New PC market" , This is only stats from Steam Users , it's more of a Gamer market. And a new system build every 5 years seems about right to me...as a Gamer. but we don't have enough information here for the overall PC market.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    digitalgriffin said:
    Better than good. If you think about it people now replace systems about once every 5 years now (60 months) Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm working off memory.

    That means roughly 1.66% of people replace their system every month. If AMD is capturing 1% of that, AMD has captured ~60% of the new PC Market (1/1.66). Compared to Intel's stranglehold over the years and the number of fabs Intel has, this is huge.
    It would be huge if AMD would also make the appropriate amount of money from it, but as it stands AMD made almost nothing from these sales and the replacement sales might be 60 months off...
    and if they are only gaining market share because cheap, they will lose it again if they raise prices.
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    TerryLaze said:
    It would be huge if AMD would also make the appropriate amount of money from it, but as it stands AMD made almost nothing from these sales and the replacement sales might be 60 months off...
    and if they are only gaining market share because cheap, they will lose it again if they raise prices.

    Have you seen their stock and earnings reports? All this while paying off massive amounts of debt.
    Reply
  • spongiemaster
    digitalgriffin said:
    Have you seen their stock and earnings reports? All this while paying off massive amounts of debt.
    Yes, they're barely profitable. $157 million last quarter. Intel, the company supposedly getting kicked around by AMD, pulls in more profits every three days.
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    digitalgriffin said:
    Have you seen their stock and earnings reports? All this while paying off massive amounts of debt.
    Yes I have, per quarter they make around 7.5bil in revenue but only about 150mil net which means that TSMC or whoever else takes the lionshare of that money and AMD only gets scraps.

    If you look at the long term debt you will see that AMD saves their net income for 3-4 quarters and then uses it to pay off that amount of debt every 3-4 quarters.

    https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMD/amd/revenue
    Reply
  • Nightseer
    Makes sense, since Zen2 was huge for changing mindshare of both reviewers and users. And getting those gains on Steam with amount of people is great.

    And while yes, they aren't making Intel numbers or anywhere close to it, you still need to remember that AMD is a lot smaller than Intel and they literally came out of grave, considering get were selling their campus just to stay afloat for long enough to make Zen. Not to mention that one of major reasons for Ryzen success was value. Plus not to mention in how many areas Intel is working beside CPU market, Intel has their hands in much more markets.

    Plus they will need Zen3 to profit further, while Zen2 is absolutely amazing, if we go past 14nm memes and everything, because while enthusiasts care, more massive group of average Joe's don't, Intel still isn't far enough beging in some workloads and gaming. Intel could easily be competitive, if they price adjusted 10th gen and removed some if that forced segmentation. So AMD can't really afford to make big bucks and stay better value. And yes, I know this won't be popular opinion, but whatever, it is true. Not everyone does core heavy work stuff that take advantage of Zen2 architecture or needs above 8 cores where AMD pulls core lead. Which is why Zen3 will be bigger game changer, if everything goes well. And I am looking forward for it.
    Reply