Huge AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 5 5600X sales combine with Matisse in Mindfactory report to leave Intel's Rocket Lake with a Sisyphean task

Intel’s Rocket Lake series needs to be incredible if Team Blue hopes to make a big impact and spoil AMD’s ongoing party in terms of popularity and sales, especially when it comes to data scraped from Mindfactory. Redditor u/ingebor has kindly posted numerous charts and graphs that depict just how much Intel has fallen over the years against AMD with the data from December revealing that Zen 3 desktop parts are likely to be just as successful as the Matisse Zen 2-based chips. Even though some leaked Rocket Lake-S related benchmarks have been particularly promising, it now feels like it will more likely be Alder Lake that could actually make a difference for Intel in this area.

While the powerful 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 5950X is not the most popular chip in terms of units sold, its high price means it was the fourth most successful chip by revenue for December 2020. Another Vermeer part, the Ryzen 5 5600X was the biggest money-maker, raking in €1,623,000 (US$1.97 million) while the Intel Core i7-10700K was the best representative from the competition here by bringing in €374,000 (US$455,000). As for winners by numbers of individual units sold, the Matisse Ryzen 7 3700X led the pack with 4,960 units shipped and the Ryzen 5 5600X was close behind on 4,560 units. In comparison, the most popular Intel chip, the Core i5-10400F, amassed 1,070 sales.

Ingebor’s charts show that Matisse is still the top dog in terms of AMD CPUs sold and revenue share, but Vermeer is definitely catching up, especially in regard to revenue (48% Matisse vs. 43% Vermeer). Unsurprisingly, Comet Lake accounts for most of Intel’s CPU sales and revenue. When these two charts are merged, it’s not a pretty picture for Team Blue, as AMD snags 83% of the CPUs sold share and a massive 86% of the revenue. Of course, there will be some that suggest Mindfactory and processor sales in Europe are heavily biased toward Team Red; however, one of the graphs (see below) show this clearly wasn’t always the case.

Focusing on just the number of CPUs sold graph, it can be seen that Intel was considerably more popular than AMD from 2015 until well into 2017, with a further spike occurring in early 2018. The introduction of Matisse (Zen 2 microarchitecture; Ryzen 3000 series desktop CPUs) and the continued positive reception of Pinnacle Ridge (Zen+; Ryzen 2000) turned things around for AMD to such a point that sales figures for Team Red have soared past the glory days Intel once enjoyed. A Vermeer spike can also be seen already taking effect, with all this combining to leave Intel’s upcoming Rocket Lake series with a practically impossible task in turning things around.

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