An independent study conducted by the European Hardware Association (EHA) has revealed that AMD now ranks higher than Intel in the CPU space. While we have seen this as recently as last week, where we reported on top sellers across some Amazon webstores in Europe, with AMD scoring most of the top sellers in both Germany and the UK, this is the first time a comprehensive study has put some verifiable, science-generated numbers for us to see.

According to the EHA, 60% of the European PC enthusiasts (in a sample of 10,000 respondents) showed a strong sentiment towards AMD as their favored manufacturer of CPUs, and would choose any sort of system with an AMD CPU over an Intel one (including APU, AMD + Radeon graphics cards and AMD + NVIDIA graphics cards). This is a far cry from the same time around last year, where AMD only held 40% of a similar sample's preferred buying intention, and up from the 50% shown in the same study, carried out in 2H2019. The same survey also shows a slightly increased preference for AMD's graphics cards, with the 1H2019 showing 19% preference compared to 23% in this latest study.It's easy to understand why AMD has been on the rise (meteorically, if I can say so) on purchase preferences for new systems and hardware, be it at a consumer or enterprise level. AMD's IP has never been stronger, and their CPU division has been shredding Intel's efforts to keep up - aided by none other than their manufacturing partner TSMC, who have recently achieved the spot of most valuable Asian company.

EHA chairman Koen Crijns had this to say:

"The last three years has seen AMD gain a lot of momentum in the enthusiast segment. With the Ryzen series of CPUs, AMD has eliminated any lingering performance gaps, while offering a great price/performance ratio. The surge in preference from 50% to 60% over recent months, can be explained by the launch of AMD's latest 3rd generation Ryzen desktop CPU. Ryzen 3000 not only offers better performance under multi-threaded workloads, but also under lightly-threaded applications like PC games.