Investor confidence in AMD is high at the moment, and its share price is heading steadily upwards, with one analyst predicting that the company could be in for a big – or even bigger, rather – sales spike with its Ryzen processors this year.

As reported by The Street, research analyst Mitch Steves of RBC Capital Markets believes that AMD’s “share gains in PCs will continue to move into the mid-20% market share range” as we go forward, and that he has “higher conviction in server units in both 2020 and 2021” for AMD to boot.

Recent figures on desktop CPU unit sales from another analyst firm, Mercury Research, pegged Ryzen chips with an 18.3% market share in the final quarter of 2019. That was up from 15.9% at the end of 2018, to give you some perspective on the expected acceleration of sales AMD could achieve according to Steves.

Obviously any analyst forecasting should be taken with a suitable amount of caution, though.

In those recent figures from Mercury Research, AMD made even stronger upward progress in laptop processors, with a 4% year-on-year increase to reach a 16.2% market share – and that will likely worry Intel even more (because mobile chips are where the majority of sales are at).

All of this isn’t too surprising given the current picture of Intel’s CPU stock shortages, rumored delays to next-gen Comet Lake desktop processors (potentially down to power consumption issues), and AMD’s already strongly surging Ryzen sales – plus its incoming Ryzen 4000 products which are expected to provide a major performance boost (potentially up to 20% compared to 3rd-gen Ryzen CPUs).

Analyst day

AMD has also been generating excitement around its upcoming ‘financial analyst day’, which takes place on March 5, with speculation contending that we might just see the reveal of the Big Navi (or ‘Nvidia killer’) graphics card there (although we’re not so sure that rumor will actually come to fruition). Equally, we might just witness the unveiling of AMD’s new Arcturus data center GPU, which has been the subject of recent leakage.

Who knows, but Steves expects ‘bullish news’ from AMD at the investors meeting, with the firm expected to be talking about its path to gaining a 30% market share in server processors, no less. Again, that’s an arena where Intel is dominant, but definitely under fire from AMD’s new silicon (powerful 2nd-gen Epyc chips).

Intel needs to respond to these threats, that much is clear, and another whisper we’ve heard on the grapevine is that the chip giant will bring its financial might to bear on the CPU market at large, throwing billions of dollars at pushing Core (mainstream) and Xeon (server) processors. This could mean some serious (further) price cuts across the board for Intel, but all this is shaky speculation as it stands.