AMD has won over millions of fans around the world thanks to its Ryzen processors, and both the Matisse desktop processors and Renoir mobile APUs have been warmly welcomed by users and the media alike. This glut of good feeling for AMD is once more demonstrated in the Steam hardware and software survey for May, where AMD now has 22.4% share of processor usage. The survey shows AMD CPUs with high clock rates are much more popular lately, indicating that gamers are happily adopting the Matisse and Renoir offerings, which has also frequently been shown in Mindfactory sales data reports.
However, there could be a change coming, and it is an exciting one for consumers. AMD’s Matisse Refresh (launch July 7) will be delivering new desktop parts that offer slightly higher clock rates than their predecessors and feature other technological enhancements over the regular Matisse range of chips. But Intel’s Tiger Lake series of mobile processors is also looming over the horizon (launch possibly July based on increasing amount of leaks), and with its reported impressive iGPU performances, it appears this latest generation from Team Blue is going to offer up a much greater challenge than the damp squib that was Comet Lake. So there are new choices coming for both desktop-based gamers and for those who prefer to game on a laptop.
For the moment, AMD clearly has the upper hand, thanks to the 0.74% rise in share on Windows-based devices and a 1.17% rise for Linux-based devices. Consumers are attracted to the way AMD does business and offers terrific price-performance ratios that are always appealing to desktop PC builders. For all intents and purposes, it seems Intel has been resting on its laurels for too long, arguably still taken aback by how the Zen microarchitecture has been overwhelmingly adopted by users after the mess that was Bulldozer. Regardless of where your loyalties lie, it’s definitely a good time to be in the market for a new desktop processor or laptop.