Desktop CPU Shipments Crater 20% Amid High Component Costs, But AMD Gains Record Share Despite 'Ugly' Desktop Processor Market — Intel Floods Laptop Market With Millions Of CPUs
Excluding IoT, SoC, and embedded products, both AMD and Intel substantially increased CPU shipments sequentially, but AMD grew faster and gained unit share in every major segment, so the company now controls 30.7% of the overall x86 processor market, its highest share ever, according to Mercury Research. With IoT, console SoCs, and embedded CPUs included, AMD now controls 34.1% of the x86 processor market. Intel continues to lead, but AMD's growth is impressive.
"AMD's total unit shipments and total market share reached new record highs in the second quarter of 2026, with a sequential share gain of 0.7% and an on-year gain of 6.5%," McCarron said.
In general, the results for the quarter suggest that Intel's improved client CPU supply helped to meet demand from PC makers and led to a client PC market rebound, the company could not stop AMD's share gains.
During the quarter, AMD gained 1.8% QoQ and 2.7% YoY in unit share because declines in its shipments were considerably smaller than Intel's. So, while normally we say that AMD is gaining desktop share because of strong sales of its latest Ryzen CPUs, in this case AMD's success was driven by slower declines than rapid gains.
Mercury Research notes that its broad server share calculation somewhat disadvantages AMD because Intel's edge and networking processors are now reported within its Data Center and AI (DCAI) business, so in reality, AMD's unit share should be higher. If the comparison is narrowed to EPYC versus Xeon processors for servers, AMD's unit share reaches 46.4%, up a substantial 2.9% QoQ and 9.2% YoY, which puts AMD very close to Intel in the core data center CPU market. Meanwhile, if CPUs for edge and networking applications are ignored in Mercury's analysis, Intel's dollar share would increase considerably.
Mercury Research indicates that server CPU supply constraints could limit gains in Q3, but in Q4 sales of data center-grade processors will increase noticeably both compared to Q2 and Q3.
AMD's performance was stellar as it gained ground in every major segment even as Intel substantially improved processor availability. Despite improved availability of Intel client and data center processors, AMD still outgrew Intel and reached record overall and client CPU unit shares.
Desktop remained the major weak spot due to high component costs and generally lower demand as enthusiasts pulled in their purchases to 2025, greatly lowering sales of high-end hardware in 2026. Shipments of desktop x86 CPUs fell more than 20% YoY, whereas mobile and server volumes increased.
In core data center processors, AMD's EPYC share approached Intel’s Xeon share, which highlights how dramatically the competitive balance in the server market has shifted.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Wednesday August 26, @12:12AM (7 children)
As long as RAM is this expensive, gpu: are this expensive .... Why would I need a new CPU? I'll make do without.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Wednesday August 26, @02:04PM (1 child)
RAM is the component that skyrocketed the most and was followed closely by the NVMe SSD. Shoot even HDDs are a bit on the expensive side. The GPU situation has more or less settled down already. Aside from the fact that we're likely never getting another high-end GPU less than $400+ and that's assuming you're not using Nvidia in which case you may as well double that number.
Yes, apocalypse is now, the AI Overlords have come for our stuffs. And yet, if you could afford to put together a $1000 computer 2 years ago, you can afford something reasonably equal. You just won't be getting the latest hotness without some serious compromises. Also, if you want to play with AI. You're going to have to pony up for it. Up to this point, there were few reasons to have a computer with more than 32GB of RAM and 32GB of RAM was more future proofing than anything. Video Editors and people dealing with giant data sets, etc. sure, they could use 64GB, maybe 128GB of RAM. Most people didn't need that for anything they wanted to do. Now, you want to run some LLMs locally. Assuming you want some of the big ones, you want something that can deal directly with those large models that can easily consume all the RAM you throw at it. At minimum for decent performance for local LLM, you would be looking at say an AI Max+ 395 with 128GB of RAM. The nice thing being that the LLM can use most of that 128GB of RAM without the major performance costs of a traditional desktop/laptop with an 8 or even 16GB GPU and 128GB of RAM.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday August 26, @02:09PM
Oooff..., and the cost of a 64GB vs a 128GB system essentially doubles. Literally due to the RAM only. RAM cost is definitely stupid right now.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Wednesday August 26, @04:23PM (1 child)
It's increasingly the whole computer. GPUs, RAM, SSDs and increasingly HDDs are getting increasingly expensive. I haven't bothered to look at motherboards, but those are probably getting expensive as well.
None of which is reflective of a functioning market as most people would be just fine with a computer from 10 years ago, and increasingly even further back.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 27, @02:23PM
My big data drives were getting a bit long in the tooth (9 years old) so... time for new ones. In January 8TB was $170, which was higher per TB than the old ones. A month later that same drive was $220, and after that there weren't any to be had. Now it's $400, if you can find one, and for a while smaller spinning rust were nowhere to be seen.
New motherboards went up before the spike, which has done current prices no good, but it's not as drastic as storage and RAM.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 27, @03:12AM (2 children)
Just went shopping for a "new" (used) setup. Base criteria, Xeon and ECC and a tolerably modern chipset.
Workstation motherboard, about $400, not terrible for what it is. (Was about 2x that new.)
CPU, starting at $60, very doable.
RAM, 64GB is really the minimum for serious use, $300 for DDR4.
Halfway decent 10 year old GPU, $300.
And in the end it's still a middle-aged setup.
Or I could up my game to DDR5, and add a thousand bucks to the price.
Maybe I'll wait a bit....
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday August 27, @11:23AM (1 child)
I could afford a new computer if I wanted. Over the years I just came to the conclusion that I don't really need a new computer anymore. It doesn't do anything for me. I can only type so fast and I'm not really that into gaming, AI, Crypto or videoediting. So in that regard it would or should be fairly cheap to buy one that does what I need. But as long as the "old" one holds there is no need to replace it. The current internet connected machine I have was built in 2016 (or was it 2017). It has had one drive replacement. That is it. I have enough other computers, much much older once. That I could use to. But they won't go online without issues or annoyance.
For me the fun of a new computer sort of went away decades ago in some regard. It's now just a machine. A digital typewriter with some extra communication. So what they are trying to sell as the latest and greatest just doesn't have that much appeal to me.
But as upgrades or fixes SSD and RAM prices are sort of making it an issue. Graphics and CPU doesn't really concern me unless the card goes up in smoke.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 27, @02:14PM
I maxed out all my DDR3 machines before the rampocalypse (even DDR3 prices have gone insane), and upgraded CPUs where I could (old Xeons are cheap, and worth the bother). They're as good as they can be for being 2012-2016 models (the 2016 is actually less capable than the 2014, but it's a gaming board and the older one is a workstation) And I cleverly acquired some backup drives before the price went ridiculous.
For pretty much everything I do every day, what I have is good enough, tho there are things I want to play with that need newer hardware. And if I had to, I could afford it. It's not the price, it's how much the price went up even for used and outdated hardware that makes me bristle and have second thoughts.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bentonite on Wednesday August 26, @02:01AM (8 children)
Such a small percent isn't a crater - we need to pump those numbers up to 100%.
For 99% of desktop use cases, any new old-stock or used CPU from several generations ago, to the latest, practically should have no significant difference.
The industry doesn't seem to realize, that the fashion obsession over getting the latest computer it pushes, is not as successful when the fashion equipment has beyond ludicrous prices (sure, some idiot will pay anyway, but most won't) and when proprietary software slowdown hasn't yet managed to negate the recent performance improvements (it seems the most recent technique is to shove huge amounts of L3 cache at the problem of terribly programmed software, to make many RAM R/W's hit L3 cache instead, but that will be negated soon enough).
If you use decently programmed software, a Core 2 Duo CPU, or even an Intel Atom N270 is fast enough; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second?useskin=monobook#CPU_results [wikipedia.org]
If a CPU can carry out in excess of a billion instructions a second (N270 apparently does 3.8 billion/second) and software is running slow, the CPU isn't slow - the software is slow.
The thing that bounds performance at such high CPU speeds is RAM speed and I/O speed.
Not much improvement has been made after DDR3 RAM, as on a clock-for-clock basis, there is not a significant difference in performance between DDR3, DDR4 & DDR5.
It seems the most expensive NVMe SSD's are now significantly faster (would work just fine with a Core 2 Duo even, provided a PCIe adapter card, with only a minor performance decrease due to PCIe 2.0), but when it comes to properly programmed software that caches to RAM as needed, it doesn't seem that there would be much difference.
Regardless, it would be much better for the planet if the fashion of throwing 1-2 year old computers out and buying new ones was to come to an end.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 26, @02:21AM (1 child)
Totally agree. For amazingly low prices, can get low end PC laptops that are perfectly adequate for video conferencing, office work, and even a bit of gaming. Bought a few from Woot for $75 each back in Feb of this year. They weren't Chromebooks either, they came with Windows 11.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday August 26, @10:06AM
My desktop PC is 20 years old next year. Runs pretty much everything I've ever run on it at single-digit CPU loads.
Having said that, I'm looking forward to the Chinese fabs starting to churn out RAM in bulk quantities so it's affordable again on new buys you can't avoid. And glad I bought a Chinese mini-PC with SSD and RAM for a few hundred dollars just before the prices went nuts.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by epitaxial on Wednesday August 26, @03:37AM (2 children)
Good point. Things are orders of magnitude faster but software doesn't load any faster. Fire up a complex software package today and it takes the same loading time as it did 30 years on a slow IDE drive.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Wednesday August 26, @06:21PM (1 child)
They deliberately leave the loading screen up for a "long time" to make the product feel more substantial. It's what people expect. Especially with commercial software, it makes them believe they're getting something more valuable.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Bentonite on Thursday August 27, @03:38AM
There's not a chance that the loading screen is artificially extended by more than a few seconds - the software is just programmed that badly and the developer can't be bothered to fix it (the suckers keep paying regardless, so why bother?).
Something taking 5 seconds to load may feel substantial for some sort, but realistically nobody wants to be waiting for something to load - they accept it because all proprietary software they've ever used has been slow to load.
Normies meanwhile love predicted fetching, as they hate waiting for websites to load - but with predicted fecthing, by the time they've finished hunt and pecking the domain in, the bloated page has finished loading and comes up almost straight away.
Another example is a "GTA 5" loading screen taking a ridiculous amount of time to load with many complaints, which the developer refused to fix until a youtuber went and illegally fixed their broken loading logic with a binary patch, which sufficiently embarrassed the developer into making the trivial fix required to substantially improve loading times.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hiltonlee981 on Wednesday August 26, @04:31AM
When component prices stay ugly, a lot of people liquidate whatever is sitting in a drawer. Same pattern shows up with old jewelry—broken chains, unmatched earrings, 10K/14K scraps.
The trap is treating a pawn/scrap offer as “what gold is worth.” Retail and melt are different numbers. Weigh the piece in grams, check the karat stamp, then compare the offer to melt. Buyers need margin, so you won’t get 100%, but if they’re at 40–50% with no explanation, walk.
When I need a quick melt ballpark before I go in, I use this scrap gold calculator [mygoldcalc.com] — weight + purity, done.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday August 26, @07:05PM
Indeed, 20% is far more than a crater. Did Theia "leave a crater" on the Earth when the moon was created?
20% is quite more than a crater.
Donald Trump is a mixture of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, multiplied by ten.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 27, @03:23AM
There's a big performance jump between core2duo and i7-3xxx or so, but even at 12-13 years old, the latter is still a very practical system for most use. Max out RAM and give it an SSD (or NVMe-on-a-card
if it will boot from that) and it's slick for pretty much anything that's not recent gaming.
And there's where the "fashion" is... gamers churn hardware like no one else. I've concluded the hardware vendors use gamers as beta testers, because they're always chasing that max FPS and will put up with all manner of issues to achieve that.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26, @03:03AM
I'm waiting for JoeMaggot, and his roomie VGA to pipe up to know what to believe!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday August 26, @01:05PM (1 child)
I fear some negative cascade for the future.
1. Shift to enterprise equipment, including retooling
2. Consumer prices go up
3. Consumer prices go further up as result of vicious circle
4. Even more emphasis on the enterprise market
5. Enterprise bubble pops
6. Massive over capacities, no easy shift back to the consumer market
7. Bankruptcies lead to further price increases
8. ...
9. Profit
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Thursday August 27, @02:28PM
The consumer market has always been an afterthought. All the real money is in enterprise business. who buy PCs by the pallet. Witness how easily the manufacturers gave up that consumer market as not worth the bother when the big buyers come calling.
The worse problem is that it's largely speculative buying of product that doesn't yet exist.
Otherwise, tho... your 9-step is sadly predictive.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.