After a long period in the desert, AMD's renaissance in the world of workstations is eloquently confirmed.
Puget Systems, a workstation designer, is a key player in this sector. One of its managers - William George - has published an interesting report on the situation on the processor side. Indeed, while Intel was until recently ultra-dominant, the situation has clearly reversed with the arrival on the market of the Ryzen range. Today, Puget Systems explains that 60% of its configurations are based on AMD solutions against "only" 40% on Intel.
Compared to the previous note written by William George, the progression is not meteoric: in February 2021, AMD was present in 59% of Puget systems against 41% for Intel. If the change is minor, it confirms a trend that the manager had already highlighted last March and that he summarizes perfectly through the graph above ... but let's go back a little further in time first. Indeed, in 2006, AMD is very present in workstations. At Puget Systems, it represented half of the solutions, the other half obviously going to Intel.
However, it was Intel that then imposed itself, while AMD had all the trouble in the world to renew its ranges. Little by little, AMD products became scarcer in workstations and - you can see it on the graph above - in 2016, they were simply absent: Intel then controlled almost 100% of the market. Announced in December 2016, the first Ryzen allowed the trend to begin to be reversed: with the second half of 2017, the first effects were (tentatively) felt.
The second generation of Ryzen processors (April 2018) confirmed AMD's return to favor, but it was obviously with the release of the third-generation Ryzen (Zen 2) that things turned around: throughout 2020, Puget Systems thus kept at least 25% of AMD-based solutions. Of course, the release of the fourth-generation Ryzen processors (Zen 3) only serves to reinforce this, and it is no doubt thanks to the high quality of these Ryzen 5000 series that AMD is now at the heart of 60% of Puget's machines: 32 AMD systems against 22 Intel. It remains to be seen whether the release of Alder Lake-S at Intel will redistribute the cards again.
