Friday, November 13th 2026
AMD Loses Desktop CPU Share for the First Time in Months, Intel Regains Ground
AMD's share of desktop CPU shipments fell to 29.9% in the third quarter of 2026, according to new Mercury Research data, shared by PC Gamer. That's a five-point drop from the 34.9% AMD held in Q2, with Intel climbing back to 70.1%. It's also AMD's lowest desktop figure since early 2025, when it sat at around 28%. A year ago, AMD held 33.6% of the desktop market.
Mercury itself admits it isn't sure what caused the swing. Its best guess is that weaker laptop demand let Intel shift more chips to desktops, which usually see a seasonal bump in the third quarter, after Intel had been under-supplying that market earlier in the year. AMD, on the other hand, didn't seem to get that seasonal increase. Mercury also points to AMD's heavier reliance on PC gaming, a market it says has been hurt by supply constraints on gaming GPUs. On top of that, AMD has openly admitted that demand is running ahead of what it can ship, and Lisa Su recently called AMD a "data center first" company.
Intel's gain probably says more about supply than about its desktop chips suddenly winning over gamers. Mercury notes that desktop volumes took a large hit in Q2, and both companies saw mobile CPU shipments drop by more than 10% in Q3. In servers, the trend went the other way, with AMD rising to 35.5% from 34.5% the quarter before.
Sources:
Mercury Research, via PC Gamer
Mercury itself admits it isn't sure what caused the swing. Its best guess is that weaker laptop demand let Intel shift more chips to desktops, which usually see a seasonal bump in the third quarter, after Intel had been under-supplying that market earlier in the year. AMD, on the other hand, didn't seem to get that seasonal increase. Mercury also points to AMD's heavier reliance on PC gaming, a market it says has been hurt by supply constraints on gaming GPUs. On top of that, AMD has openly admitted that demand is running ahead of what it can ship, and Lisa Su recently called AMD a "data center first" company.
54 Comments on AMD Loses Desktop CPU Share for the First Time in Months, Intel Regains Ground
Something bad is happening or is associated with AMD
AHAHAHA!!! Bad stupid AMD. AMDead, AMDoomed. Nvidia/Intel rulez.
Something bad is happening or is associated with Intel or Nvidia
AMD is next. AMD will suffer more. AMD and their leaders are the same.
I believe a large number of these issues are people not removing old drivers properly first before installation and AMD should include an automated universal GPU driver uninstaller that runs after asking is this the first time installing drivers for the card.
The amount of users who think it's ok to skip driver uninstalling or simply can't use DDU or AMD uninstall tool correctly is staggering.
I don't see how you came to that conclusion.
Intel has put a lot of effort into laptops, and strong support for OEMs is only part of it, as an upstream vendor, it knows more than OEMs and uses this knowledge to help clients solve problems, so major clients will naturally buy into it. If you ignore clients, the result is obvious.
Intel's products are also much better, as the latest lp-e core design can improve battery life, which is very critical for laptops
amd's latest Strix Point is split into two CCXs, and zen5c takes up much more area than e core darkmont while having lower performance. The efficiency of Strix Point p core is also far inferior to p core Cougar cove. Intel's support for iGPUs is also good, often featuring the latest decode, providing features like xess and mfg.
Strix Point laptops are priced expensively, and are by no means cheaper products than Panther lake.
New report claims Intel is 'struggling' to supply laptop CPUs based on its latest 18A node after speaking to Computex sources | PC Gamer
RAM crisis has delayed everything for client, as products are overpriced.Stop peddling nonsense. She said data centre company and not AI company. Learn something.Did you read the article? Laptops have slowed down. Intel was able to ship more to desktop. Intel CEO also said in Q3 call that they were shifting more of wafers previously assigned to Panther Lake for laptops to Xeons.Almost one third of client market and more than one third in servers is NOT "a drop in a bucket". Nonsense.I have seen this on several fora, some people desperate to peg Lisa Su to Jensen's situation, in any way possible. It's not going to work, ever.
AMD has a broader silicon portfolio and has never been as heavily dependent on one market segment, unlike Nvidia. Also, it was Nvidia that was involved in GPU smuggling, breaking export laws.Your teeth fell off, indeed.Not really. We have had no SINGLE comprehensive report that AMD smuggled GPUs silicon against export rules.
There is no sane world where you could possibly compare what Jensen has done to anyone else. Hence, he is out. Pretty simple stuff.
cult leaderCEO of their favorite company sacked himself, so they decided to come to an AMD thread to voice their frustrations. Just makes me laugh.As a reminder:
If you are the CEO of a public company and the investors want you out, they're gonna kick you out, doesn't matter the reason.
You know how expensive that would be, not to mention how high the price will be for consumers?
It's not chump change, it's billions, and they would have no way to recoup the investment, since enterprise customers don't want that, and wouldn't buy it, and consumers would complain that the price is way too high and wouldn't buy it either
We need to be aware of the scale of the problem too. One linked article or isolated incident is not going to cut it against a wide body of evidence against actions that Nvidia was involved with. Let's remain sane.Was it investors who pushed Jensen under the bus? No.
The chiplet design philosophy has won out for both AMD and Intel (and others), there is no going back to single monolithic design of past CPUs, it's just too costly with the reticle limits, and would be very impractical
I think these companies are one of the main culprits in making this crisis happen. Notice this: it was caused and brought about, not happened by chance.
Until then articles of this kind translate to this.
Vya Domus sold an RTX 5090 to john_
john_ took an airplane, gone to Moscow, gave the RTX 5090 to Putin.
Conclusion. Vya Domus is smuggling RTX 5090s to Putin.
It's hilarious how many people jumped in here to call AMD slow garbage yet were missing in any of the recent Nvidia threads.
AMD still has more than 1/3rd of the overall market which to me seems a good accomplishment compared to where they were before Ryzen.
Intel can flood the market with cheap chips due to owning their own fabs, they also got funding as a 10% stake from the US gov. And to this day I can only assume they still have tight partnerships with OEMs like Dell and HP with incentives to only sell Intel CPUs.
Both companies are losing sales in the consumer market due to the ever increasing dram prices cause of the dram cartel