Intel is still top dog: ships 3x more CPUs than AMD and Apple combined

While global PC shipments experienced something of a decline for much of 2023, some green shoots have been spotted in terms of recovery in the industry as a whole. The GPU market saw a 5.9% rise in GPU shipments at the tail end of the year, and, according to some recently released statistics, when it comes to the desktop and notebook market it seems like Intel may be leading the comeback over its competition in the CPU sector, demonstrating some truly dominant leads over its nearest rivals.

That's according to the latest stats from Canalys, a global technology market analyst firm (via WCCFTech). For the last quarter of 2023, Intel shipped a staggering 50 million CPUs, maintaining a market share of a truly gigantic 78% with a 3% year on year growth. That figure stands in stark comparison to AMD's eight million shipments and a market share of 13%, showing a slight 1% decline in shipments year on year.

That's still significantly more than Apple, with a reported six million units shipped with a 4% decrease in shipments. For those of you that like an overall equivalency, that equates to well over three times more desktop and laptop CPUs shipped than both of Intel's main competitors in the CPU market combined, quite an impressive achievement especially given that AMD in particular has some very competitive desktop chips for sale, including the gaming benchmark dominating Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Still, it's not all about PC gaming and desktop chip performance figures. The PC notebook sector has been credited as leading the charge in both rising GPU and CPU segments, and while gaming laptops are likely to account for some portion of that rise, laptop and notebook sales as a whole are said to account for almost 69% of the global CPU market.

It's something of a clean sweep for team blue it seems, as by the looks of these recent figures the x86 CPU segment remains firmly under its grip.

However, if the most recent leaks are to be believed then it may not be long before AMD releases some new contenders in the desktop CPU market, in the form of its "Granite Ridge" Zen 5 architecture chips, currently tipped to potentially launch between April and June of this year. When it comes to the laptop CPUs, the new "Strix Point" Zen 5 mobile chips are also rumoured to be appearing later this year.

As things currently stand Intel remain tight-lipped about the next-generation Arrow Lake desktop CPUs due to replace the current Raptor Lake Refresh generation, although with Computex coming up in June and Intel's Pat Gelsinger set to deliver a keynote, perhaps we'll get a clearer idea as to when we'll see these two giants go head to head in the desktop market with some new silicon, or maybe even a look at some new laptop chips in the form of Lunar Lake. Time will tell.

However, it is worth noting that AMD has been making some gains towards Intel in overall market share, although it still has a long way to go before the blue team might start to worry. It remains to be seen whether a new generation of chips can swing the market one way or the other, or whether Intel will continue to dominate into the future.