AMD CPU market share is the highest it's been in three years

It's no secret that AMD has been losing its grip on the desktop and notebook markets against Intel for well over a decade. At CES 2016, for example, manufacturers left and right were unveiling the latest Ultrabooks and gaming notebooks equipped with Intel CPUs while all AMD had to show were work-in-progress OEMs that were only at the concept level. The launch of Ryzen, however, is setting the chipmaker back on track.

According to the latest data from popular benchmark site PassMark, AMD processors had accounted for 25.8 percent of all x86 CPU scores submitted to the PassMark database during the past quarter. The last time the chipmaker reached any higher was back in Q1 2014 with a share of 26.2 percent and a notable all-time low of 17.5 percent back in 2016. While this is nowhere near the >70 percent market share of Intel, the Ryzen hype seems to be paying off with respectable sales thus far.

To be clear, the PassMark data is not representative of the overall PC market as it only accounts for specific user-submitted benchmarks running on Windows PCs. The spike in AMD market share is to be expected since more curious users and enthusiasts will want to see just how well the new Ryzen series can compete against Intel in raw benchmark numbers. Once the smoke clears, it's likely that AMD market share will once again stagnate.

Ryzen has yet to make its way to notebooks where Intel and Nvidia are ubiquitous on the current crop of gaming laptops. Asus was the first to announce a Ryzen-based laptop at Computex 2017 and HP is also likely to have something in the works since the manufacturer has been pushing AMD-based ProBooks, Pavilions, and Omen laptops in addition to the usual Intel variants.

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