AMD is still the number two company when it comes to CPUs (and, arguably, GPUs,) but team red have steadily been winning over the desktop CPU market, especially among gamers and professionals, for the last few years now with its phenomenal Ryzen line of processors. In fact, AMD has been doing nicely lately, and have managed to achieve its biggest share of the CPU market for over 14 years.

The news comes via Mercury Research, who have noted that AMD's share of the x86 CPU market reached 22.5% in Q2 of 2021, and while Intel still holds the largest share at 77.5%, Intel's market share in trending down, and AMD's is heading up.

When the first Ryzen CPUs launched four years ago, AMD's fortunes began to turn around, and subsequent improvements in the form of Zen 2 and Zen 3 have only continued to secure AMD's continued growth. Its processors have proven hugely popular thanks to their increased cores and threads over Intel's offering, as well as being unlocked on every SKU, and providing a very competitive price point compared to Intel. In productivity tasks such as video rendering, Ryzen is generally blowing Intel out of the water.

It's the first time AMD has enjoyed this kind of market share since the old Athlon 64 days back in the early to mid naughties. The figures from Mercury Research include all desktop and laptop machines, servers, and also include the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, which also use AMD x86 silicon. 

It's not all good news though - AMD's market share in the purely PC desktop space did slip during the last quarter, and that appears largely due to the silicon shortage that has been impacting the technology industry. The Ryzen 9 series, especially on the high end, have been incredibly hard to find in stock until recently.

It'll be interesting to see if that figure bounces back now that Ryzen appears to be more readily available at MSRP, with Intel also on the verge of releasing it's new Alder Lake range of processors, which will be the first to support DDR5 memory.