TheRetroArcade
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Posts: 13,553
Joined: Feb 2026
Joined: Feb 2026
Ain't nobody buying gaming CPUs right now.
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Intel appears to have gained market share from AMD in a rare turnaround for the company. The red team's chips have been in the lead in performance and popularity for many years now, and frankly, they still are. That's what weird about this one: AMD may have lost ground because it makes the best CPUs for gaming.
The latest Q3, 2026 data from market researchers Mercury Research suggests an increase in market share for desktop CPUs of 5.1%. Now, considering AMD has fought tooth and nail for a decade to increase its share to around 35% as of Q2, 2026, dropping down to just 29.9% in the following three months marks a gargantuan lurch back towards Intel.
Our pick for the best gaming CPU is the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and many other AMD chips make up our recommendations. While we do recommend the Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus due to its surprisingly low price tag and plenty of cores, I wouldn't go as far as believing any Arrow Lake chip has been key to turning around Intel's fortunes among gamers. The architecture struggles to keep up with AMD's latest in gaming, and it is built on a dead-end platform—Nova Lake chips are expected soon on a different motherboard socket.
The increase in market share is almost too big to be believed, which is certainly one theory as to what's going on. A rounding error or errant data—though Mercury Research have been pretty locked in in the past. Both Intel and AMD cite their numbers when it makes them look good.
Mercury Research put its hands up to say it isn't totally sure what happened, either:
"It's difficult to know the driver of this for sure, but we speculate that due to the lower mobile CPU demand, Intel could allocate more products to the desktop market, which normally sees a significant demand increase in the third quarter, and Intel had been under-supplying this market earlier in 2026.
"AMD, however, did not appear to have a seasonal increase, which resulted in Intel having a very large sequential and on-year gain in desktop CPU market share," Mercury Research says.
The PC Gamer Circuit Breaker newsletter breaks down the latest PC gaming tech, and finds you the best deals on the best products
The other theory presented by the market research company is that AMD has "greater exposure" to gaming—by way of offering the best gaming chips.
"We believe another component to Intel's gains here is AMD's greater exposure to the PC gaming market, which has suffered due to supply constraints of gaming GPUs."
Mercury Research say 'supply constraints' when it's more like prices are so absurd for GPUs, RAM, and storage as to be comical, which lends to a general malaise among gamers to building a new PC. But, either way, this theory makes some sense. Intel still holds huge sway with system builders and OEMs, the likes of which are buying up both new and old (DDR4-compatible) chips for cheap systems. And not just gaming systems, which we see both Intel and AMD get a fairly decent share of during our weekly trawling for gaming PC deals.
AMD also admitted it is has a supply deficit at the moment; demand is outstripping supply. It's working to that deficit, but what it means by that is grow its datacentre chip business more in the coming months and years. After all, AMD is a datacentre company now.
I wouldn't mistake Intel 'gaining market share' as a healthy sign for the company or the wider industry. Mercury Research suggested desktop CPU volumes had seen a "large drop" in Q2, 2026, and both Intel and AMD are said to have seen more than a 10% drop in shipments for mobile chips in Q3, 2026. They're fighting for scraps in the consumer market.
Intel has seen a momentous share price drop as of late due to weak sale expectations due to a crappy PC market, but AMD is set to beat Intel for total revenue by the end of year.
1. Best overall: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Intel appears to have gained market share from AMD in a rare turnaround for the company. The red team's chips have been in the lead in performance and popularity for many years now, and frankly, they still are. That's what weird about this one: AMD may have lost ground because it makes the best CPUs for gaming.
The latest Q3, 2026 data from market researchers Mercury Research suggests an increase in market share for desktop CPUs of 5.1%. Now, considering AMD has fought tooth and nail for a decade to increase its share to around 35% as of Q2, 2026, dropping down to just 29.9% in the following three months marks a gargantuan lurch back towards Intel.
Our pick for the best gaming CPU is the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and many other AMD chips make up our recommendations. While we do recommend the Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus due to its surprisingly low price tag and plenty of cores, I wouldn't go as far as believing any Arrow Lake chip has been key to turning around Intel's fortunes among gamers. The architecture struggles to keep up with AMD's latest in gaming, and it is built on a dead-end platform—Nova Lake chips are expected soon on a different motherboard socket.
The increase in market share is almost too big to be believed, which is certainly one theory as to what's going on. A rounding error or errant data—though Mercury Research have been pretty locked in in the past. Both Intel and AMD cite their numbers when it makes them look good.
Mercury Research put its hands up to say it isn't totally sure what happened, either:
"It's difficult to know the driver of this for sure, but we speculate that due to the lower mobile CPU demand, Intel could allocate more products to the desktop market, which normally sees a significant demand increase in the third quarter, and Intel had been under-supplying this market earlier in 2026.
"AMD, however, did not appear to have a seasonal increase, which resulted in Intel having a very large sequential and on-year gain in desktop CPU market share," Mercury Research says.
The PC Gamer Circuit Breaker newsletter breaks down the latest PC gaming tech, and finds you the best deals on the best products
The other theory presented by the market research company is that AMD has "greater exposure" to gaming—by way of offering the best gaming chips.
"We believe another component to Intel's gains here is AMD's greater exposure to the PC gaming market, which has suffered due to supply constraints of gaming GPUs."
Mercury Research say 'supply constraints' when it's more like prices are so absurd for GPUs, RAM, and storage as to be comical, which lends to a general malaise among gamers to building a new PC. But, either way, this theory makes some sense. Intel still holds huge sway with system builders and OEMs, the likes of which are buying up both new and old (DDR4-compatible) chips for cheap systems. And not just gaming systems, which we see both Intel and AMD get a fairly decent share of during our weekly trawling for gaming PC deals.
AMD also admitted it is has a supply deficit at the moment; demand is outstripping supply. It's working to that deficit, but what it means by that is grow its datacentre chip business more in the coming months and years. After all, AMD is a datacentre company now.
I wouldn't mistake Intel 'gaining market share' as a healthy sign for the company or the wider industry. Mercury Research suggested desktop CPU volumes had seen a "large drop" in Q2, 2026, and both Intel and AMD are said to have seen more than a 10% drop in shipments for mobile chips in Q3, 2026. They're fighting for scraps in the consumer market.
Intel has seen a momentous share price drop as of late due to weak sale expectations due to a crappy PC market, but AMD is set to beat Intel for total revenue by the end of year.
1. Best overall: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?