AMD's Matisse beasts are far from toothless as Ryzen 3000 helps to gnaw at Intel's Steam survey share

It seems a fitting choice for AMD to borrow the surname of the French artist Henri Matisse to use as a codename for its Zen 2 Ryzen 3000 processors. Matisse went through a creative period of combining Impressionism with strong colors and became a leader of a group of painters known as les Fauves (French for “wild beasts”). The beasts that make up AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series have been painting a colorful picture of their own in Steam’s latest CPU survey.

At one point last year, Intel was reaching the heady heights of gaining almost 85% system share of users who contributed to the Steam hardware survey. But there has been a general decline for the blue team in overall market share, which has been exacerbated over the last two months likely thanks in part to the introduction of AMD’s Ryzen 3000 processors.

In July, AMD had a total of 18.1% share on both Windows and Linux-based systems put together. In August, this figure leaped to 19.2% and September has seen a further credible rise to 19.7% overall (19.37% share on Windows and 24.95% on Linux). The large positive changes can be attributed to some extent to AMD’s newly introduced Matisse range for a number of reasons.

There would have been plenty of desktop PC enthusiasts and gamers who would have wanted to get their hands on a member of the Ryzen 3000 family as quickly as possible, with the first Matisse chips launching in July. This would have positively affected the Steam share, as would have the inevitable discounts for older Pinnacle Ridge desktop CPUs and the introduction of Picasso APUs. With a 16-core beast waiting around the corner and the third generation of Threadrippers still to be unleashed, it appears AMD will continue to bite chunks out of Intel’s share.