The Loyalty To AMD’s GPU Product Among AMD CPU Buyers Is Decreasing

Data from the builds on PCPartPicker show an interesting trend among the buyers of AMD CPUs. Of the 25,780 builds on PCPartPicker from the last 31 months with a price point between $450 — $5,000, 19% included an AMD CPU. This is in-line with the Steam Hardware Surveys, but things have changed recently.

Before drawing conclusions from this data, it’s important to note (as this PCWorld article rightly points out) that this data is based on builds, not sales, and is representative of the enthusiasts on PCPartPicker.

Brand Loyalty Mattered For AMD

Builds with AMD CPUs tend to be much less expensive than those with Intel CPUs. The builds with an AMD CPU were $967 on average versus the Intel CPU builds, which were on average $1,570. In the last 31 months, brand loyalty to AMD seemed to push AMD CPU builders to choose AMD graphics cards at a much higher rate than Intel CPU builders. 55% of machines with an AMD CPU also had an AMD GPU; whereas, only 19% of builds with an Intel CPU included an AMD GPU.

But That Brand Loyalty Impact Dropped In Last Six Months

In the last six months, AMD has started to lose even more ground to Intel and to Nvidia. On the CPU builds, only 10% of gamers building on PCPartPicker were opting to buy an AMD CPU. Among these, the percentage that decided to pair their AMD CPU with an AMD GPU dropped to 51%. The challenges that AMD is seeing in the overall GPU market are being felt even amongst their loyal supporters.

How Consumer Purchases Are Impacting AMD

This drop in builds is a concern as PC gamers are seen as the only bright spot in PC hardware sales. Without strong support in the gaming community, AMD is facing pressure across the board from its key rivals and general market trends. On the consumer side, Nvidia increased sales by 63% year-over-year in Q3 versus only an 11% increase during a similar time period for AMD.

On the enterprise side, AMD released a powerful FirePro card that allows for hardware virtualization, which is important to cloud providers, but they’re not keeping up with Nvidia’s datacenter growth rates. Year-over-year Q3 results showed AMD’s enterprise segment growing at 31% while Nvidia’s similar business unit grew at 193% (although from a much smaller base).

Our technology runs on either an AMD or Nvidia GPU, but our cloud provider, AWS, only offers the Nvidia Grid cards today.