The fight between AMD and Intel for processor market share seems to be getting extremely close, with PassMark reporting that AMD now has 40% of the market – a level of success that the company hasn't seen for over 14 years.

This is worrying news for Intel, which has enjoyed almost complete dominance of the CPU market for a while now.

However, AMD’s resurgence in 2019, including the well-received launch of is AMD Ryzen 3000 series and aggressive pricing strategy, has seen the company snatch away market share from Intel at an impressive rate.

The last time AMD had over 40% of the processor market share was back in 2006 – 14 years ago.

What the data means

While AMD hitting 40% market share is impressive, it’s important to note that this data comes from PassMark, and which only covers computers that have the PassMark benchmarking software installed.

As PassMark is only available on Windows, it means that only Windows PCs are counted, and the graph (shown below) only counts Intel and AMD. Other CPU manufacturers aren’t included, though as PassMark states, “We do receive a small number of submissions of CPU types other than AMD and Intel, however the percentage is so small as to make it not worth graphing.”

The chart only includes x86 processors, and not other chip architectures. However, due to the popularity of PassMark’s software, it still gives us a good idea of just how well AMD is doing.

So, should Intel be worried? We think so. AMD’s recent successes has clearly chipped away at Intel’s market share, and the company is going to have to bring out something special to win back consumers. As Wccftech explains, while Intel is still using the 14nm process (compared to AMD moving to 7nm), its processors maintain higher clock speeds than AMD’s products, which make them better gaming CPUs.

However, that may not be enough to combat AMD’s rise. You can check out PassMark’s AMD vs Intel Market Share chart, which is updated daily. Unlike the graph posted by Wccftech, this doesn’t show AMD above 40% just yet, but the company is clearly approaching that milestone.

Based on these charts, AMD could have a very good 2020 indeed.