Following the release of the last official Steam Hardware Survey, AMD, for the first time in many years, struck a pretty significant blow against Intel by capturing a 30% CPU market share. At the time, we were fairly convinced that while the growth would be small, Team Red would continue to push until at least the end of the Summer to capture more ground in the highly competitive processor market share stakes. – Following the release of the latest figures, however, while the results are shocking, it’s not because AMD’s managed to snag more customers. In fact, it’s quite the opposite!
Steam Hardware Survey Sees Intel CPU Gains!
As part of the latest figures, it has been confirmed that Intel’s CPU market share value increased by 1.72% over June. A figure which has quickly eradicated that brief stint in which AMD achieved that 30% mark. Now, admittedly, this is just on Steam and, as such, should not be taken as entirely gospel to the current influences of consumers. Amazon, for example, still shows AMD as the hugely more popular brand.
Put simply; there’s no apparent reason why Intel has quickly clawed back such a significantly high number of users on the Steam platform. We literally, and in all honestly, have no explanation for this. Speaking of mildly bizarre stats, however, the Steam Hardware Survey has thrown up another weird one, and it’s probably something that Microsoft isn’t going to be too keen on seeing!
Windows 7 Spikes!
If you thought Intel claiming some CPU market share back off AMD was unusual, then the next one is just simply outright bizarre. Again, for reasons we can not determine, Windows 10 has seen an even greater drop in users, with the majority of them apparently going back to Windows 7! – Out best guess in this regard is only seen in the possibility that people might have been firing up old PCs or laptops to see where they stand with the upcoming Windows 11 and its compatibility.
While the rest of the Steam Hardware Survey is, pretty much, exactly what you would expect to see, these two results make it, without a doubt, one of the craziest we have encountered for quite some time. I mean, Intel gaining CPU market share over AMD less than a month after Team Red hit a new high? Windows 7 being one of the biggest growing operating systems and at the clear expense of 10? – Put simply, with these results in hand, I’m beginning to worry that the apocalypse might be nigh!
You can, incidentally, check out all of the results from the latest Steam Hardware Survey via the link here!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
The problem with the Steam hardware survey is that it’s not granular enough to provide meaningful statistics, but I think it’s possible to explain the results simply by looking at the language list. Chinese is up 6% and Korean 2%. That would suggest the sampling of more internet cafes, which have typically used Intel CPUs and lower end NVIDIA GPUs. It’s possible to see an uptick of GeForce 1060 (3GB variant, based on the VRAM listing) and 2060.
There’s the question of whether it’s a result of variation in the systems sampled or an actual uptick. I’d say that at least for China it’s likely variation in sampling. These internet cafe upticks have featured prominently in the survey before, and I see no reason why there’d suddenly be an influx of new 3GB 1060 GPUs or Windows 7 machines. For Korea it might be newer systems, with that accounting for the upticks in the GeForce 2060 and 6 core intel CPUs.