The takeaway: Although Intel technically continues to dominate CPU shipments, AMD has been steadily chipping away at that lead for years. As Team Red continues to release more compelling socketed CPUs and game consoles powered by its chips keep shipping, Intel has yet to break free from its ongoing troubles.
According to data from Mercury Research obtained by Tom's Hardware, AMD's desktop CPU market share for the third quarter of 2025 reached a new milestone at 33.6%. The figure represents a 1.4% increase from the previous quarter, a 5.2% year over year gain, and an impressive 10.6% jump compared to the second quarter of 2024. Although Intel maintains a significant lead with 66.4% of the market, that lead has been shrinking steadily over the past decade.
While Intel still sells the most desktop CPUs overall, AMD's Ryzen 9000 series chips have nearly pushed Intel's latest competitor, the Core Ultra 200 lineup, out of sales charts throughout 2025. The Ryzen 9800X3D, TechSpot's current gaming CPU champion, has repeatedly ranked at the top of Amazon US sales charts.
The chip has singlehandedly driven the adoption of 8-core CPUs over 6-core models, and it likely contributed to AMD's recent Steam Survey CPU share growth, which has now surpassed 40%. Intel's three-year-old Raptor Lake processors remain its most popular, likely because the company has yet to respond to AMD's 3D V-cache technology. That could change with upcoming releases.
The client x86 market also observed a milestone from AMD in Q3 2025, as the company's share grew to 25.4%, up 1.5% from the previous quarter and 1.4% compared to the same period last year. Tom's Hardware attributes Intel's decline to 74.6% to supply constraints. Including embedded, IoT, and game console SoCs raises Team Red's client x86 market share to 30.9%, up by roughly 5% over the past year.
AMD even regained some ground in the mobile CPU sector, a rare area where Intel gained market share during the last quarter. Team Blue's below-seasonal shipment levels allowed its rival to rise to 20.6%, up by 1.4% from the second quarter. However, Chipzilla still grew its mobile CPU market share slightly year-over-year.
Team Red also sliced away another 0.5% of Intel's server CPU market share during the latest quarter. Both companies shipped more server chips than last year, but AMD benefited more from an accelerating Epyc Turin ramp.
Notably, overall unit shipments of x86 CPUs in Q3 2025 were flat compared to Q2. This is unusual because back-to-school shopping traditionally drives a seasonal increase, followed by early holiday shopping in September.