The big picture: AMD has been on a tear with its Ryzen desktop CPUs for a while now, but fresh sales data from one of Germany's largest computer hardware retails reveals that Intel is still putting up a fight. And with Alder Lake just around the bend, things are looking even more promising for team blue.
The breakdown comes from Reddit user ingebor, who regularly shares data regarding the desktop CPU market, and details desktop CPU sales from Mindfactory. According to the data, a full 85 percent of processors sold by Mindfactory in May 2021 were from AMD, leaving just 15 percent of the pie for Intel. By July, Intel had closed the gap a bit and captured 24 percent of CPU sales.
The data is meaningful for a few reasons.
First, while it only represents a single retailer, the trends are consistent with what we are seeing at other retailers. Eight of the top 10 best-selling CPUs on Amazon are AMD chips. On Newegg, seven of the top 10 chips are from AMD.
Something else that Intel has going for it is its pending launch of Alder Lake. Chipzilla is expected to unveil high-end Alder Lake chips at an event in October but could save the rest of the lineup for CES 2022 in early January.
Alder Lake will be the company's first chips to utilize a big.LITTLE architecture and are expected to be compatible with Z690 motherboards. Earlier reports suggest the Z690 chipset will support both DDR4 and DDR5 and could support PCIe 5.0.