More people are using AMD CPUs than ever before

pcgamer.com:

AMD has been making inroads into Intel's dominion for many years now, since the launch of the first Ryzen desktop CPU in 2017. From there, it's built its best desktop CPUs in the Ryzen 5000-series processors, and its Zen 2 architecture has found a forever home inside the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5. What that means today is more people are playing games, editing videos, and deleting spam emails on AMD hardware than ever before.

AMD accounted for 25.6% of the entire CPU market in Q4, 2021, according to Mercury Research, a research company often cited by big names in the tech biz. What that means is AMD accounted for a quarter of all PC CPUs, server CPUs, embedded chips, and semi-custom products during that three month period, leaving Intel to gobble up the largest slice of the pie at 74.4%. There's also the nominal 0% credited to VIA, the only other x86 licensee.

Mercury Research partially chalks that up to a very large increase in gaming console shipments during the October–December period, which is to be expected to try and meet the demand of the busy holiday season. Demand wouldn't be entirely satiated, of course, as we're still in a global semiconductor shortage, but it's still a busy time of year nonetheless.

If you look to just desktop CPU supply, AMD has actually lost some ground to Intel over that same period, dropping 0.8%. Same goes for mobile share, where it dropped 0.4% for the quarter despite being up overall for the entire year. AMD has made some of that up in server share with its EPYC chips, at least, gaining 0.6% during those final three months of 2021.

AMD's previous record quarter was during the hazy days of 2006. Its Q4 then saw it hit 25.3% market share, during which time its Athlon and Opteron