Could AMD Return to Athlon64 Market Share Levels?

AMD held their “One Year Ryzen Anniversary” call yesterday which not only went over the success of Ryzen over the past year, but also provided insight into what is planned for 2018 and more. When specifically asked about market share status and goals, Jim Anderson, SVP and GM of Computing and Graphics at AMD stated that, “I don’t see any reason we can’t get back to historical share levels that AMD has enjoyed in the past.” If you can remember back in the early 2000s the company boomed on a market share above 20% for desktop and slightly below for notebook. This is made possible thanks to the Athlon64 processor, which offered very strong competition to what Intel offered at the time.

ryzen effect

By providing more cores for less money with Ryzen AMD hopes to repeat that success, while also integrating Vega graphics into their APUs. AMD’s big focus for Ryzen in 2017 was desktop, but 2018 will be the year AMD makes a big push into the notebook market. AMD increased their desktop CPU market share by 50% year-over-year from 8% to 12% (Q4 2016 – Q4 2017) and in Q1 2018 50% of the company’s client compute revenue came from Ryzen, an increase of 40% from Q4 2017. At some retailers AMD is even seeing a 40-50% CPU sales share.

segment expansion

60 new Ryzen-based platforms and expected from OEMs in 2018, with many of them being mobile designs. This opens up a $10 billion market for the company to grow in, in addition to the $9 billion desktop CPU market. There is also a focus towards Ryzen Pro (desktop and mobile), which is targeted towards government and enterprise customers through additional security and management features.

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