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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

And despite all these amazing reviews. AMD still isn't selling much CPU or APU at all. I am wondering why. On Steam Survey [1], AMD grew from November 2018 at 17.5% to April 2020 at 21.9%. That is less than 5% increase in total. ( I was actually surprised it had ˜18% in 2018 ) And despite EPYC offering, [2] it barely make 5% of the Server market even if AMD had zero revenue from console.

Why is that? Enthusiast has been overly excited they ignored the actual reality? Or what other factor at play? Inertia ?

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

[2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15754/amd-reports-q1-2020-ear...

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Most people don't buy new processors every year, and pre-built machines (especially laptops) are slower to switch from Intel. Slow adaptation is part product lifecycle (laptop lead time is on the order of a year) and part customer demand: Non-enthusiasts consumers still want their i7, and businesses will often have requirements for Intel specifically, and will have to work to change that, if anyone internal even cares to.

This. Some of my friends are still running Intel's 4690k, which was released all the way in 2014, as that suffices for most of their basic tasks and games at low-mid settings, as a lot of gaming is GPU-bound.

With the typical 5-year upgrade cycle on CPUs for most non-hardware-enthusiast gamers and general-purpose users, I would expect the AMD share in Steam stats to drastically increase by about 2022.

Also, mind you, Steam numbers are not really representative of the overall market. Most online hardware retailers reported 50%+ of their high-end CPU sales to be AMD in Q1 2020.[0]

0. https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-market-share-gain-q1-2020/

Because the DIY market is reletively small. Intel still has huge sway with OEM's (and mindshare with consumers). It's difficult for AMD to overcome that even with a better product

Inertia, or lack of real reason to upgrade. Personally I'm still on a CPU from 2013(Intel Core i5-4570S). Havent really felt the need to upgrade. And pretty happy that I went with 16GB ram back then, since its still enough for me today(browsing/light gaming/coding). I've probably spent 10 times what that CPU cost on SSDs since then, so its not a cost issue for me. And more recently a Geforce 1070 TI. I've been thinking about upgrading, but I really need to see significant IPC lift to bother. So maybe a Zen3 or Intel next-gen sometime in 2021. If they manage to raise IPC.

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