I understand that the 3 first statistics include non x86 CPUs

These numbers are really bad for both AMD and Intel, honestly. It suggests that the x86 server/desktop monopoly is getting crushed in a major way.

Yes: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/lowest-cpu-shipments-in-30...

Where are the non-X86 desktops??

I assume what the numbers actually mean is that desktop market share is shrinking to insignificance (confirmed by a sibling comment), and servers actually have significant competition from ARM now.

Edit: Also Macs.

Mac Studio, Mac Mini, iMac for starters.

Some Chromebooks too.

Most Chromebook run x86 processors. You would be hard pressed to find one that didn't

> Most Chromebook run x86 processors.

Objectively true.

> You would be hard pressed to find one that didn't

Eh, that's less true; I own 2 ARM Chromebooks, because I wanted some non-x86 in my life, and neither was hard to find, it just took me actually looking for it.

> You would be hard pressed to find one that didn't

Search Chromebook on bestbuy, exclude out of stock and sort by price, and you'll see a mix of arm and x86.

The Samsung Chromebook Plus came out years ago and is ARM. There's also the ASUS C201 which is ARM and has Libreboot support.

Is a Chromebook a "desktop", or "mobility"? I have a hard time thinking of a Chromebook as a "desktop" PC.

Honestly, I think the research firm's divisions are crap. WTF is "mobility" anyway? Why would this not include laptops?

> I have a hard time thinking of a Chromebook as a "desktop" PC.

A Chromebox is a desktop PC. And ChromeOS devices can run a full Debian Linux distro in a VM. What's not desktop about that?

Smartphones can run a full Debian Linux distro in a VM too, but that doesn't make them desktop PCs.

Ok. It sits on a desktop, has an external monitor and keyboard and mouse, and let's you run general purpose computing tasks, like compiling a C++ program. You can even plug in a USB printer and scanner. You can get them with 16G of RAM and i7 CPUs. You can put them in dev mode, wipe the OS, and install any Linux distro of your liking. Is that a desktop computer?

Or is the definition of desktop computer that it can, say, run Adobe Photoshop natively?

Phones can do most of the things you listed.

So a "desktop PC" isn't about its feature set or where you might put it, instead it is a form factor.

NUCs, Mac Studios and Chromeboxes all have the same form factor. I believe there are All-in-one desktop Chromeboxes as well. The exclusion of desktops running ChromeOS from the desktop category is weird - especially considering they are capable of running Debian Bullseye VMs out of the box (x64 or ARM)

>Or is the definition of desktop computer that it can, say, run Adobe Photoshop natively?

My point is that the Chromebook is a mobile device: it's tiny and easy to carry around. So why is it not in the "mobility" category? And for that matter, why is every laptop computer not in this category? When did "mobile" somehow become equal to "something you can carry in one hand while also operating it"? The entire point of laptops was that they're mobile. These days, not that many people use "desktop PCs", outside of corporate offices, they use "mobile devices" (i.e. laptops).

And where do tablets fall? You can prop them up on a desk and attach a keyboard, and they act just like a laptop (you can also connect external screens etc.).

As I said before, their categories are stupid.

Here is a ChromeOS computer, that by your definition, is a "desktop":

https://www.hp.com/us-en/chrome/chromebase-all-in-one-deskto...

To the original point, it sleeps perfectly.

Oops, the bit about it sleeping perfectly was context leakage from another thread ;)

Chromebooks and other laptops would be in the "mobility" category. I'm pretty sure smartphones aren't counted anywhere, although things like the ipad may count in "mobility" as well.

Since the M1 release I have really soured on x86. I had no interest in anything else for the last 30years...and certainly had never purchased a $3000 laptop before.

I purchased a MacBook Pro last year...zero remorse.

Well...when you're spending that much money of course you're not going to feel remorse XD

An iPad with a keyboard

Smartphones.

No, seriously. Most peoples' computing needs and desires are satisfied with a phone, they don't actually need a laptop let alone a desktop.

It's not that x86 is losing market share, it's that Personal Computers are changing from the desktop/laptop form factor to the smartphone form factor. It's mere coincidence ARM and not x86 powers all those smartphones.

Smartphones aren't counted as desktops in these statistics.

Less than 10% market share= crushed? These arm plans were initiated either before or when Zen was in its infancy. Amazon and others are going to have a real tough time competing with Genoa/Bergamo in server. ISA is unimportant, just ask Jim Keller or Mike Clark, it's all about execution and I'm sorry but you're not going to be able to compete with a team like AMD's. Apple's consumer chips are alright but they are never getting more than 20% of pc market share and are about to be embarrassed by Phoenix APUs. Oh and to the guy here claiming smart phones will replace pcs, go try and type an essay, play a AAA game, browse the internet with multiple tabs, music and discord on all at once on an iphone.

Amazon doesn't have to compete with AMD on performance, only on TCO. Not having to pay Jim Keller's salary is a good way to reduce your TCO. Graviton generally does win on TCO for most applications today.

Also, if 30% of x86 market share corresponds to ~20% of "big processor" market share, that means that non-x86 cores have about 30% market share.

European companies are discovering the same thing, too. They have embraced ARM and RISC-V very strongly.

I'm not so sure. The pc landscape is very diffuse, just imagine trying to get every windows app onboard with moving to arm. And until they do, the pc manufacturers aren't going to bother making hardware. Games consoles are moving to x86 to make porting easier, even though they have full control of the stack.

Unless Google chromebooks up their game, or the pc disappears completely I don't really see arm taking over.

I find that difficult to believe, unless they did something weird like to lump smartphones into mobility.

I thought ARM represented like ~5% of server install base, and maybe like 10% of 2022 server sales. Similarly, I understood Chromebooks + Macbooks (the two major laptop ARM products) to be on the order of 25% of laptop sales.

These are both real and meaningful chunks of market, but I don't think they're enough to make up for the discrepancy in numbers. Perhaps they are including game consoles.

[Edit] - found reporting on 2021 numbers they clearly seem to indicate that the first three sets of numbers are x86 only (https://venturebeat.com/consumer/mercury-research-amd-closes...)

The two big extra categories would seem to be game consoles (as suggested by GP), and IoT.

I assumed it's due to their server chips being way more efficient, powerful, and cheaper than the equivalent parts from Intel.

That is not an answer to the (math) question they were asking.

I found this bit from networkworld.com: "In the server market, AMD's total market share grew from 10.7% at the start of 2022 to 17.6% at the end of the year, while Intel fell from 89.3% at the start of the year to 82.4%. Interestingly, the server chips that are selling the most aren't the newest and greatest models" Hard to tell what calculations are being used to derive the percentages. Maybe they are using dollar amounts per total spending on all chips, and server chips cost more, therefore driving the market share numbers?

Yeah this must be it. In my experience new AMD server chips are better in pretty much any way, for most workloads. Everybody I know seems to agree. It just doesn't make economic sense to go Intel for new servers.

I reached out to Mercury Research (the company whose research is being quoted) and the articles are missing some clarifying information.

The overall CPU Market Share number also includes both IoT and SoC numbers which are not included in the other numbers and in which Intel's shipments have declined substantially while AMDs SoC products (including game consoles) are making up a large number. This is what's responsible for the disparity.

They also added that the data was distributed with a helpful clarifying note the news articles are mostly omitting:

* Please keep in mind that due to the inventory corrections taking place, that the statistics and share movements reported here in the past few quarters -- and likely for the first half of 2023 -- are more reflective of the suppliers differing in the depth and timing of their inventory corrections, rather than indicating sales-out share of the PC market, which is something we probably won't know with any accuracy until late in 2023. *

I’m guessing ‘SoC and IoT’ includes things like the CPUs in NAS appliances. I have noticed recently a huge proliferation of AMD Ryzen CPUs in these devices when a couple of years ago it was Celerons/Pentiums.

The Steamdeck's APU (and others using the same tech) are becoming more common, not sure if those count as 'desktop' or 'console' though...

Valve is the only user of the AMD "Van Gogh" APU. Other handhelds are using regular laptop parts.

I think AMD originally pitched it for laptop makers since it was leaked in 2020: https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-mobile-apus-for-2021-2022-de...

But I suspect they rejected it because they don't care about IGP performance, just as they rejected Intel's "Iris" Broadwell CPUs and the hybrid amd/intel chip.

I’m surprised those aren’t being shifted to much cheaper ARM chips.

Perhaps they're not cheaper.

I bet they will in due time. They have to recompile their whole stack to ARM, which probably isn't easy, but ARM is eating the world. It's only a matter of time.

That's what they said about Itanium too. /s

I think that's clearly not an apt analogy.

The 80-core ARM servers Hetzner provides are great. A nice midpoint between a slower general-purpose x86_64 server and an expensive and brittle GPU server.

I can easily see datacenters with these things in the future.

Probably a question of performance. NAS and IoT appliances have performance requirements too.

Majority of consumer nases are running the cheapest oldest arm and mips cpus they can find.

Low-end NASes have been using ARM for a long time.

The higher end x86 NASes are advertised closer to "home datacentre in a box" solutions that offer VM/container runtimes and third party software markets.

So far, x86 is significantly more user friendly and performant for these use cases: the "desktop-ish performance for desktop-ish prices" range doesn't really have many hardware options (Apple certainly won't sell theirs to OEMs, and the Snapdragon 8c is a bit on the low end, and the real data centre ARM many-core monsters are too big); and the software offerings aren't quite as user friendly either.

> NAS appliances

I love my Synology and love that they are going AMD. While some argue that having video transcoding on a NAS is wrong, it’s also very handy, but the AMD options I’ve seen aren’t a patch on quicksync.

That tech is unbelievably good and might be the only bit of Intel I like.

It helps that AMD is very generous with unlocking advanced features in even lower cost SKUs; low end Intel chips tend to be crippled in several ways.

The Intel not making chips for any gaming console I'd imagine