



AMD's steady climb in CPU market share thanks to its second-generation Ryzen processors is becoming even more apparent as we head into the closing months of 2018. We've been following this trend via sales data from Mindfactory (as compiled by Redditor Ingebor), which showed AMD with a 45 percent share in June, at parity with Intel in July, and slightly overtaking the company in August with a 51 percent share

The numbers for September are in, and they represent a huge spike in market share for AMD. For the month, AMD's share rose to 65 percent, which is an incredible month-over-month rise. Looking closer at the numbers, we can see that the new 12nm Pinnacle Ridge processors made up the bulk of AMD's sales for the month at 57 percent. Pinnacle Ridge was followed by Summit Ridge and Raven Ridge with 23 percent and 18 percent shares respectively. Finally, the HEDT Ryzen Threadripper processors only accounted for 2 percent of AMD's processor sales for the month.

Moving on to Intel, we can see that Coffee Lake processors have completely taken over with regards to CPU sales at Mindfactory with a commanding 89 percent share. The remaining 11 percent is taken up by Kaby Lake (9 percent) and Skylake-X (2 percent).

When we take a look at the actual revenue share of processors sold, it's actually a closer match between AMD and Intel. The former took a 52 percent share of revenue versus 48 percent for the latter. This is a much different picture from the 65 percent/35 percent split when it comes to actual units sold for AMD and Intel respectively. This discrepancy can be attributed to Intel's higher average selling price (ASP) for its processors compared to AMD.

One other thing to consider is that AMD CPU prices have in general been trending downward (with an uncharacteristic spike in August), while Intel's supply issues have resulted in steadily increasing prices for Intel's Coffee Lake and Kaby Lake processors at Mindfactory.

Analysts have been talking favorably about AMD in recent months and its potential to steal significant market share from Intel due to supply issues. One analyst even went so far as to say that AMD could triple its overall share of the global processor market from 10 percent to 30 percent as Intel attempts to address its production bottlenecks.

For its part, Intel announced late last week that it is investing an additional $1 billion to increase capacity at 14nm manufacturing sites in Arizona, Oregon, Ireland and Israel. In the meantime, the company is prioritizing production of Core and Xeon processors to "serve the high-performance segments of the market."

And in an effort to acknowledge the gains that AMD has recently made, Intel interim CEO Bob Swan wrote, "We are thrilled that in an increasingly competitive market, you keep choosing Intel. Thank you."