AMD gaining ground on Intel

AMD and Intel have been wrestling so to speak for years now for PC x86 market share with AMD faltering until recently.

It has been a stellar year for AMD which has gone from strength to strength ever since 2017 when they released their Zen architecture processors ryzen 1000(14nm) series than later the ryzen 2000(12nm) series also known as Zen+ featuring high core counts with equally higher than average thread counts that translated into processors that could not only game well but also carry out other functions like streaming and video production(creative workloads). Which came as a shock not only to consumers but also to their main competitor Intel which at the time was stuck pushing out dual-core i3 models and four core-four thread i5 processors.

To be clear at the time one would have been allowed to be sceptical of the new AMD offerings as the high core count game was something that AMD had attempted in the past and those offerings failed to meet expectations but to their credit, AMD addressed those issues and have gained back not only market share but also their credibility as a solid competitor to Intel AMD followed up their initial success with the release of zen 2 3000(7nm) series of processors which not only brought higher efficiency but also improved performance on the previous generation of processors and the higher IPC( instructions per clock) directly translated to better gaming performance side note -higher IPC on Intel chips is what has been keeping Intel the gaming kings but AMD is closing the gap fast. AMD is set to launch their Zen 3 processors which according to rumours will launch as ryzen series 4000 sometime in September 2020 or early 2021. The 4000 series will be on 7nm like the 3000 series which has led to speculation that AMD is repeating what they did with original Zen generation by releasing an updated CPU's minus the + add on e.g Zen+ as they did in 2018.

Zen 4 is slated to come out some time beyond 2021 but most likely in 2022 which by then through AMD's admission Intel would have caught up to them by then to some degree. AMD also plans to be doing battle in the GPU market as they have also laid out plans for the development of their RDNA based GPU technology. AMD touts that their RDNA 2 will achieve twice the performance per watt output when their products become widely available in the desktop market as for now the only benchmark we can use are the new PS5 and Xbox Series X family of consoles that will feature RDNA 2 based APU's provided by AMD to both Sony and Microsoft. RDNA promises to bring realistic lighting to game environments allowing for more vibrant game environments to be created by game developers. RDNA 3 is set to launch later and if the speculation is to be believed will feature 3 times performance per watt. AMD success has gained them greater sales and a greater share of the market with current estimates stating that AMD now has over 33% market share. While Intel has lost some traction by dropping down to 69%.