Re:The Loyalty to AMD’s GPU Product Among AMD CPU Buyers Is ...
by niftich on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @02:23PM
(#13231855)
The analysis in the article (and the PCPartPicker spreadsheet from which they source their data) excludes integrated GPUs.
This is a significant difference, because Intel has a 17.48% marketshare on graphics per the Steam Hardware Survey [1] (the original source for the spreadsheet data), while AMD has a 23.46% share -- which includes both their integrated and discrete graphics.
The average price of AMD builds has risen because the lowest-end builds on the Intel side can rely on Intel's integrated graphics. Intel integrated GPUs attain one or two percent share of all GPUs for each generation, while AMD APUs are far behind.
Maybe there was a pattern of brand-loyal, sufficiently rich gamers who made a hobby out of building a new system at the very top end of AMDs offerings whenever a new generation Radeons came out. Those would not find an excuse for an upgrade this year because the latest generation of Radeons tops out lower than previous generations.
But this explanation attempt breaks down completely when I try to back it up with the numbers from the article. The way I understand them, the average AMD/AMD system has actually become more expensive, suggesting that AMD lost more at the low end. But I have similar problems with the main conclusion of the article: what I see in those tables is that the Radeon fraction has dropped faster on Intel machines than on AMD CPUs. With this in mind I would rather conclude that brand loyalty is even more important for AMD than it used to be, it's just that with shrinking general popularity of Radeons, the CPUs get less of a helping hand.