First reported by Tom's Hardware, The July Steam Hardware Survey results are in, and it's more bad news for Intel, which saw a 0.75% drop last month while AMD gained 0.74% of Steam users. This shift, which has been a trend for years now, puts Intel CPUs at 59.5%, edging perilously close to losing first place. Meanwhile, AMD CPU adoption on Steam is up to 40.39%, the highest it's ever been, putting it within spitting distance of taking the lead over Intel.
Looking back through Steam's processor usage details through the years on the Wayback Machine, things have never looked better for AMD. The manufacturer cracked 30% share for the first time in more than a decade back in May 2021, and has been steadily gaining (occasionally plateauing) ever since the introduction of AMD's game changer Ryzen architecture in 2017.
It still took a long time to get here—one year after Ryzen launched, in March 2018, AMD had only just acquired more than 10% of the share of Steam users surveyed. The last time the numbers were anywhere close to this good for AMD was all the way back in November 2008, the first Steam Hardware Survey we have on record. Back [[link]] then, AMD sat at 37.95% compared to Intel's 62.04%, a balance that would vastly shift in Intel's favor over much of the next decade.
Operating systems aside, one thing is clear: Intel's dominance in the PC gaming market is slipping—even its chip foundry business might be in trouble. For one reason or another, gamers are abandoning Team Blue despite decades of popularity for Intel. AMD's attempts to offer a stronger price to performance ratio are clearly paying off. If they can keep it up, they might just dethrone Intel in a few years' time. This also shows that market dominance is never guaranteed, something GPU giant Nvidia would do well to consider.
