07-04-2017, 09:07 AM
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryz...34926.html
Quote:Just in time for the Fourth of July, AMD's Ryzen 5 1600 rocketed from the No. 5 spot on Amazon's bestselling CPU list to the second place position over the weekend, unseating Intel's Core i5-7600K. Amazon's best seller list is hardly indicative of overall market share--a multitude of other factors complicate the issue--but it serves as a somewhat decent indicator of the state of the upgrade market.
First, the caveats. Amazon updates its list of bestselling CPUs hourly, so the results change frequently. We keep an eye on the list and also monitor price changes, and based on our casual observations over the last month (we haven't charted the progress, and we don't have access to historical data) the Ryzen 5 1600 has frequently occupied the 6th place position. That changed recently as the Ryzen 5 1600 moved up to displace the Intel Core i5-7600K, the long-running second-place processor. Intel's Core i7-7700K still enjoys the leading spot.
That move up is an encouraging sign for the Ryzen lineup. Intel has stood resolute in its current pricing scheme for Kaby Lake processors, but more competition might change the company's calculus.
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Passmark posts quarterly updates that outline the number of benchmark submissions the company has received, and AMD submissions have jumped impressively. Due to an incredibly misleading chart and article title, many mistake the results as an indicator of Ryzen's market share. The results do not represent actual sales figures, and certainly do not represent market share.
Passmark's original chart showed that submissions with AMD systems rose from 20.6% the previous quarter to 31%. That's a jump of 10.4%.
However, an unexplained update to the chart lowers the percentage to 26.6%, which is a 6% increase. In either case, that is the largest single-quarter increase Passmark has recorded from either vendor since it began tracking in Q1 2004. The incredible rise in submissions may not be indicative of actual market share, but it does indicate that something is happening, and any jump is a positive development.
We've included a quick breakdown of the numbers behind Passmark's chart at the end of the article.
We headed over to Steam's hardware survey to see how AMD is doing on the gaming front, at least on the dominant online gaming platform.
Admittedly, we didn't expect to see a reduction. According to Steam's hardware survey, AMD systems have declined by 0.85% over the last several months. We dove into Steam's more detailed data, which breaks down the users by frequency range (windows), to attempt to ascertain if the changes just represent old AMD systems that gamers are retiring. Oddly, the reductions seem to be pretty steady across the board. It's certainly conflicting information compared to other indicators, but we have to remember this survey isn't an active tracker.
There's no doubt that AMD's new lineup is changing the status quo for desktop processors, particularly in the pricing department. It isn't surprising to see the Ryzen 5 1600 enjoying success; it has a great price point and solid performance trends that merited its recent inclusion in our Best Gaming CPUs recommendations. AMD's processors might not lead in gaming performance, but the price to performance ratio is impossible to ignore.
The company has already gained significant traction in the mid-range, but it's only the beginning. AMD has even more models, including the highly anticipated ThreadRipper, coming to market later this month. That could change the paradigm on the high-end desktop market while the Ryzen 3 squeezes the low end. Mobile processors also make up roughly two-thirds of the processor pie, and AMD hasn't released its mobile variants yet.
It appears that Intel has responded, at least partially, by lowering prices for its mid-range Skylake-X models (compared to the previous generation). Unfortunately, the company hasn't changed pricing on its existing mid-range processors. Perhaps we'll see a reaction when Intel releases Cannonlake later this year.