We have already covered Mindfactory.de’s periodic data dumps for several years, as a way of cataloging how the fortunes of AMD and Intel have changed in the retail channel market. As always, treat this data with caution – although Mindfactory.de has been releasing these reports for years, it is just a company. Product adoption rates can vary by country for a number of reasons and, in the case of AMD, it has historically had strong support in Germany after building several factories in Dresden (when AMD owned factories).
In other words, don’t assume that these numbers can be applied strictly to Newegg or Amazon. We would expect to see slightly different distribution patterns on these sites, and while the broad momentum of the numbers appears comparable, there will inevitably be subtleties lost by this type of global comparison.
Closing a 2020 Moment
You can see the impact of COVID-19 in the chart below – the atypical seasonal peak in April shows Mindfactory.de sending more total CPUs in that month than in December 2019.
Image via Ingebor, via Imgur
In percentage terms, AMD’s Mindfactory.de reports with 85 percent and 83 percent revenue are not particularly higher than what we saw in previous months – AMD seized 91 percent of sales in April 2020 – but it is a clear record in terms of the total number of CPUs shipped. The 5600X and 5800X were much easier to find than the 5900X or 5950X.
Image of Ingebor, via Imgur.
There is a subtlety in the recipe numbers that I would like to draw your attention to. If you compare the upper graph (number of CPUs) with the lower graph (total revenue), you will notice that, for most of the period represented in the graph, Intel CPUs contribute more revenue than their market share seems to imply. This is the result of Intel’s historically higher average selling prices (ASPs). If you sell 10 Intel chips for $ 500 and 20 AMD chips for $ 200, you earn more revenue from Intel than from AMD, although you have sold more AMD than Intel. This has been the case for the past 15 years or so. However, it changed in November and December 2020. In these months, Intel chips contributed less to revenue than their sales figures suggest that should be the case. The chart below shows why:
Image of Ingebor, via Imgur
Intel’s average selling prices fell below AMDs at the same time as the Ryzen CPU market exploded, probably driven by the recent update of the Ryzen 5000 family. You can also see the impact of the chip shortage at the end of the year, with AMD SKU prices rising in many cases, even if you ignore the general trend line that shows the average ASP. The Ryzen 9 3900X, 3800X, 3700X and Ryzen 5 3600 show price increases until the end of the fourth quarter of 2020. That did not stop them from selling like hotcakes.
If we assume that Intel’s average for April 2020 reaches ~ 340 €, Intel’s average for December 2020 of € 249.53 is … not good.
Image of Ingebor, via Imgur
This shows the revenue share for AMD and Intel CPUs, as recorded by Mindfactory.de. It is not difficult to see why the AMD star shot while Intel took a heavy hit.
Intel’s best chance to recover in the DIY retail segment will be later this year, when Lake Rocket falls. The new CPU family is expected to provide the full measure of Intel’s IPC gains with Sunny Cove over Coffee Lake (about 1.18x), but to maintain the higher frequencies Intel originally gave up on ICL on mobile. In summary, we should see Intel CPU performance increase between 1.1x and 1.25x, depending on the workload. This is also part of the reason why Intel probably decided to downgrade to eight cores on its new CPUs. It may have made more sense to focus on building maximum single-threaded performance on a smaller number of cores instead of keeping the 10 chips premiered Comet Lake cores.
The retail market is a distinct minority of all computers – desktop sales, in general, suffered a major impact during the pandemic – but in this space, and with regard specifically to Mindfactory.de, Advanced Micro Devices is destroying sales charts.
Now read: