Watch out, Intel - AMD's Ryzen CPUs are getting far more popular going by latest Steam survey

AMD's processor sales have gone up quite considerably over the past two months according to the Steam survey, news that should get CPU rival Intel sitting up and taking notice.

AMD CPUs are now in 38.73% of the PCs owned by Steam gamers in the latest of Valve's hardware surveys which is for last month, December 2024.

That's up just a smidge over 3% compared to November, and in October, AMD only held 33.77% of the CPU share for Steam PCs, so Team Red is up almost 5% in the past two months. Intel is, of course, down by the same amount, as this is a two-horse race in the realm of PCs.

That's quite a shift in momentum which is likely to reflect the current buying choices of PC gamers upgrading CPUs in the final quarter of 2024, or indeed those buying entirely new gaming rigs - with a higher prevalence of AMD processors, apparently.

Although that said, the Steam survey needs to be taken with some caution, as the machines surveyed is a factor in constant flux, and so variations will be down to that, to an extent. But a broad trend as seen with AMD CPUs right now is undeniable.

Intel's desktop CPU misfires are taking their toll

Is there any obvious reason for this sudden uptick in the popularity of Ryzen processors? Yes, well, actually there are a couple of good reasons.

Firstly, a major factor must be the erosion of faith in the reliability of Intel silicon caused by the debacle over the instability issues with 14th-gen and 13th-gen desktop processors (caused by elevated operating voltages, and a bunch of other factors besides).

While these issues are now fixed with the affected processor ranges, the memory of the problems will live on - and likely has changed, and will continue to change, buying decisions. To have such a worrying glitch emerge over two whole generations of desktop silicon doesn't exactly lend much confidence to the Intel brand.

These issues around trust and reliability were further compounded by the arrival of new Arrow Lake processors in October 2024, which while free of any instability problems of the kind that blighted Raptor Lake and its refresh, are still regarded as something of a flop.

At least with the initial launch, where Intel's Core Ultra 200S CPUs underdelivered based on the company's prerelease hype, and in particular looked shaky in terms of gaming performance with third-party reviews (for reasons Team Blue has gone into great detail over, it should be noted - and is in the process of fixing).

Given all this, it'd be surprising if AMD wasn't poaching buyers from Intel, really, even though Team Red has faced its own problems with vanilla Ryzen 9000 chips also looking wobbly out of the gate last year for their generational uplift (again, particularly with gaming).

However, X3D is a different story, and the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is apparently selling great guns, and may even outperform the seriously popular 7800X3D in the end (though the newest 3D V-Cache chip still has some way to go yet). New X3D silicon is expected at CES 2025 imminently in the form of high-end Ryzen 9 models, the 9950X3D and 9900X3D.