It's no secret that AMD is experiencing a surge in both popularity and sales, but we've just seen some analysis that really puts AMD's recent victories into perspective.

Recently through the German retailer Mindfactory, both the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X and AMD Ryzen 5 3600 have outsold Intel's entire product range – and this isn't exactly a new occurrence. That alone would be enough to assert AMD's dominance, but Reddit user ingebor gathered up a whole bunch of sales data from Mindfactory that illustrates just how far AMD has come in the last decade.

According to this data, AMD has been beating Intel in the amount of processors sold since the tail end of 2018, but that didn't exactly result in AMD collecting more cash. This is probably because Intel charges much more for its processors on average. Reddit user ingebor included a graph recording the average selling price for each processor, and Intel has been much higher for years now. So, even if AMD sells more processors, that doesn't result in more revenue.

Until recently, that is. According to the revenue graph, AMD has recently experienced a massive spike in revenue (and in the average selling price of its processors). The graph isn't labeled by month, but it looks like this spike occurred right around when AMD launched its Ryzen 3rd Generation lineup, spearheaded by the Ryzen 9 3900X.

From the way things are looking now, it doesn't look like Intel will be taking back its leader position in the desktop CPU market, at least until Team Blue puts out its 10th gen desktop lineup. We've seen some rumors that it would be putting out some 10th-gen Cascade Lake-X processors, but it's unlikely that HEDT chips like that will regain Intel's market dominance.

Image 1 of 3 Intel vs AMD: processors sold (Image credit: ingebor) Image 2 of 3 AMD vs Intel: Average sales price (Image credit: ingebor) Image 3 of 3 AMD vs Intel: revenue (Image credit: ingebor)

Why is AMD doing so well?

AMD launched its first generation of Ryzen processors in early 2017, and that's right when we see the first spike of that red line on all three graphs. Before that, AMD had relied on its struggling Bulldozer CPU architecture, which allowed Intel to dominate the desktop CPU market with little to no competition. AMD Ryzen could have easily been a fluke, but Intel kept releasing more and more optimizations of Skylake, rather than innovating, which helped AMD's Zen architecture take over.

With each AMD Ryzen release, we see AMD gaining market share – with another spike in 2018 with Ryzen 2nd generation, and than an absolutely meteoric rise this year with AMD Ryzen 3rd generation.

Intel will be putting out a new Coffee Lake Refresh chip with the Intel Core i9-9900KS, and while it will probably sell – 5.0GHz on all cores means it will be a speedy little piece of silicon – but we really don't think it will be enough to reverse the trend. However, if Intel is able to bring some of the efficiency and AI features in Ice Lake to the desktop audience without significantly raising the price of its silicon, we might see Team Blue start to claw its way back to dominance.

And, honestly, we hope something actually happens. It's nice to see AMD give Intel some long-awaited competition, but the last thing we want to see is AMD fall into complacency like Intel did. When the PC components marketplace is competitive, everyone wins, so we want nothing more than for Intel to put out some killer processors. Now all we have to do is sit and wait to see what the 10th generation has in store.

Via Tom's Hardware