AMD CPU market share increases after Intel CPU instability reports

This month’s Steam Hardware Survey revealed how AMD has benefitted from reported issues with Intel’s 13th and 14th Gen CPUs.

The Steam Hardware Survey can often bring to light interesting trends in PC gaming hardware. The results of the survey for April 2024 appear to have done just that, showing signs that users of Intel CPUs may be jumping ship over to AMD. This gives further credence to reports that Intel’s 13th and 14th-generation CPUs have been experiencing issues.

The results of the Steam Hardware survey show that average CPU speeds for Intel processors have dropped across the board. Some show as much as a 1.8% drop in CPU speed. The exact cause of this is unknown, but it is possibly related to existing reports of Intel processor instability. The drop in speed could be the result of users dropping CPU speeds to maintain stability. It could also possibly be firmware or driver updates, trying to fix the persistent issues.

Recently, Tom’s Hardware reported that Intel believed the stability issues with 13th and 14th-generation Raptor Lake gaming CPUs were the result of motherboard manufacturers disabling thermal and power protections to achieve higher clock speeds.

In particular, Intel singled out 600 and 700 series motherboard manufacturers who had set BIOS defaults that disabled certain safeguards. This resulted in what Intel described as “sustained high voltage and frequency during periods of elevated heat,” and this could be related to the reported issues.

Previous reports have indicated that up to ten chips per day are being returned to the manufacturer and that some OEMs and PC manufacturers have seen customers returning CPUs or fully pre-built PCs in order to exchange them with AMD equivalents.

The result is a boost for AMD’s market share, but until Intel can get to the root cause of the instability, it is gamers who are paying the price.