// PC GAMER — GAMING
Intel takes massive chunk out of AMD's desktop CPU market share in unexpected turnaround - may be due to the red team's dominance in gaming chips, weirdly
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Intel appears to have gained market share from AMD in a rare turnaround for the company. The red team's chips have been in the lead in performance and popularity for many years now, and frankly, they still are. That's what weird about this one: AMD may have lost ground because it makes the best CPUs for gaming.
The latest Q3, 2026 data from market researchers Mercury Research suggests an increase in market share for desktop CPUs of 5.1%. Now, considering AMD has fought tooth and nail for a decade to increase its share to around 35% as of Q2, 2026, dropping down to just 29.9% in the following three months marks a gargantuan lurch back towards Intel.
Our pick for the best gaming CPU is the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and many other AMD chips make up our recommendations. While we do recommend the Intel Core Ultra 5 250K Plus due to its surprisingly low price tag and plenty of cores, I wouldn't go as far as believing any Arrow Lake chip has been key to turning around Intel's fortunes among gamers. The architecture struggles to keep up with AMD's latest in gaming, and it is built on a dead-end platform—Nova Lake chips are expected soon on a different motherboard socket.
The increase in market share is almost too big to be believed, which is certainly one theory as to what's going on. A rounding error or errant data—though Mercury Research have been pretty locked in in the past. Both Intel and AMD cite their numbers when it makes them look good.
Mercury Research put its hands up to say it isn't totally sure what happened, either:
"It's difficult to know the driver of this for sure, but we speculate that due to the lower mobile CPU demand, Intel could allocate more products to the desktop market, which normally sees a significant demand increase in the third quarter, and Intel had been under-supplying this market earlier in 2026.
"AMD, however, did not appear to have a seasonal increase, which resulted in Intel having a very large sequential and on-year gain in desktop CPU market share," Mercury Research says.
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The other theory presented by the market research company is that AMD has "greater exposure" to gaming—by way of offering the best gaming chips.