News PC CPU Shipments See Steepest Decline in 30 Years

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TechieTwo said:
No surprise here with everyone buying hardware during two years+ of COVID lockdowns
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^^This. You beat me to it. However, I'm not so sure how much (if any) the Ukraine war is affecting CPU sales, but I'm sure we can get YoY sales figures from Intel and AMD from that nation prior to the Russian invasion. I can't imagine they did a lot of regular PC hardware upgrades as builder enthusiasts or OEM PC/laptop buyers.

And along that note, I'd like specifically to see a breakdown of OEM desktop chip sales to the likes of HP, Dell, etc. and then to retailers who just sell the CPUs for the builder community. The PC builder community was in a tight bind due to zero availability of the latest GPUs starting near the end of 2020. That started with crypto demand then the CPU shortage hit from fab closures. I had to wait well into 2021 before I could even get a chance to buy my RTX 3080 Ti in a shuffle lottery win purchase option from NewEgg.

We know what went on with laptops as there was most definitely a spike around the world for their demand, at least in North America and the UK/EU nations, of families (and municipalities that could afford it) buying laptops for their children for remote schooling. Same with companies splurging on new laptops for the push to full time remote working (I was one of those beneficiaries three years ago next month who now works remote full time as our office complex permanently closed).
 
Not surprised, and hopefully it'll make Nvidia, Intel, and AMD cool down their damned prices. During Covid, everyone seemed to want a PC. Remote workers, cryptominers, gamers that did both console and PC that saw it as a good time to upgrade the PC, people with time that wanted to get into streaming, remote/home schooling, etc.

Even the crappiest laptop PC lasts 2-3 years, and I have gotten 8 years out of a good CPU/motherboard/RAM combo (I usually upgrade the GPU more frequently).
 
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Quoting the article...

Probably the biggest bombshell is that figures show the x86 processor market has just endured “the largest on-quarter and on-year declines in our 30-year history.”

I think what really matters is how these current figures compare to 2019, before these unique events over the last few years disrupted the usual. As stated countless times before, the climate of the world caused an explosive increase in hardware, and obviously that upward spike wouldn't last forever. Its probably the same reason why so many large tech companies experienced unprecedented growth during the pandemic, and are beginning to crash/come back down to baseline as of recent.
 
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imagine a global pandemic, forcing remote work, forcing/encouraging people to upgrade PC's.

Yes, pandemic was best tiem for pc market (As a seller) but that comes at cost of short term (in yrs term) lower sales.
also fact that cpu upgrades have very little difference to most ppl anymore (so don't feel need to upgrade frequently)

CPU, unlike GPU, have little generational performance thats easily noticeable.
 
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10tacle said:
^^This. You beat me to it. However, I'm not so sure how much (if any) the Ukraine war is affecting CPU sales, but I'm sure we can get YoY sales figures from Intel and AMD from that nation prior to the Russian invasion. I can't imagine they did a lot of regular PC hardware upgrades as builder enthusiasts or OEM PC/laptop buyers.

And along that note, I'd like specifically to see a breakdown of OEM desktop chip sales to the likes of HP, Dell, etc. and then to retailers who just sell the CPUs for the builder community. The PC builder community was in a tight bind due to zero availability of the latest GPUs starting near the end of 2020. That started with crypto demand then the CPU shortage hit from fab closures. I had to wait well into 2021 before I could even get a chance to buy my RTX 3080 Ti in a shuffle lottery win purchase option from NewEgg.

We know what went on with laptops as there was most definitely a spike around the world for their demand, at least in North America and the UK/EU nations, of families (and municipalities that could afford it) buying laptops for their children for remote schooling. Same with companies splurging on new laptops for the push to full time remote working (I was one of those beneficiaries three years ago next month who now works remote full time as our office complex permanently closed).
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??
Zzzzzz
 
Not surprising.

I built my current PC in 2019 - in 2022, rather than replacing an entire system I just upgraded, I replaced my Ryzen 2700 with a Ryzen 5700 and replaced the RX 570 (8Gb) with an RTX 3060 (12Gb). I am looking at replacing the 3060 with an A770 (Blender & AV1 encoding - gaming is not a major issue for me)

I'll get a new system in 2 years, which will be a Ryzen 8000 series CPU and probably a Battlemage GPU (assuming Intel doesn't whack their GPU division).
 
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Pandemic, surge of work-at-home options, and stimulus money certainly affected the market. Threats of rising inflation also pushed a huge drive to buy things before they got more expensive. Part of the reason I upgraded my PC last year was to beat the higher prices that are strangling products now.

Those higher prices are here, stimulus is gone, and work-at-home is being taken away. I don't think computer shipments will improve later this year given the prices and specs I've been seeing. 10-30% price increases don't make me want to upgrade anymore. x86 is being challenged strongly by Apple's chips too. Apple's OSes and Valve's Steam OS are likely starting to take a chunk out of Windows x86 too. Lots of headwinds for the PC industry in 2023.

I'd like to replace my old Yoga 720, but I'm having trouble finding a 2-in-1 that has decent performance and isn't overpriced. I feel like system vendors have become disconnected from their customers.
 
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In just about anything ever, an exceptional boom is usually followed by an equally exceptional crash that wipes out most of the excess and returns the average closer to the long-term trend. PC sales had been steadily declining for the last 10+ years prior to COVID and the "record sales decline" from the last year are offsetting excess sales from the two years of out-of-cycle COVID upgrades. This shouldn't be surprising anyone.

Price gouging from the last three years doesn't help with maintaining sales either. Companies that got too comfortable with 50+% gross profit margins may have to learn to make-do with more reasonable 30-40% margins again.
 
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hotaru251 said:
imagine a global pandemic, forcing remote work, forcing/encouraging people to upgrade PC's.

Yes, pandemic was best tiem for pc market (As a seller) but that comes at cost of short term (in yrs term) lower sales.
also fact that cpu upgrades have very little difference to most ppl anymore (so don't feel need to upgrade frequently)

CPU, unlike GPU, have little generational performance thats easily noticeable.
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Not to mention once you start exceeding 4-6 cores, it becomes more of a GPU load. Many gaming CPUs have at least 6 cores and it's getting hard to use up the CPU cores we already have!
 
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Economic factors aside, the last couple of generations of CPUs from either company isn't slow by any means, so there's no pressure to upgrade, especially when for either company it means an entirely new platform. We're not exactly talking about 50%+ performance boosts from Bulldozer to Zen 1, we're talking about 15% give or take, nothing spectacular that would justify a potential $1000+ investment, even if the economy were spectacular.
 
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I always followed CPU close, and I knew which processor would I pick. People asked me recommendations, and I knew which one was the bang for the buck for them.

Today I'm lost. There are so many models and variants with purposefully confusing names, that I would had to investigate a lot to pick one processor, and I would never be sure that I made the best choice.
 
chalabam said:
I always followed CPU close, and I knew which processor would I pick. People asked me recommendations, and I knew which one was the bang for the buck for them.

Today I'm lost. There are so many models and variants with purposefully confusing names, that I would had to investigate a lot to pick one processor, and I would never be sure that I made the best choice.
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For high end gaming:. Match with 3080/6900 GPU or higher
7800X3D
13700k
13900k (overkill + heat)
5800X3D if you have a b550/x570 platforms already

For general use:. Match with 3060ti or 6550XT
13500k

For budget gaming: match with 6600 or arc 750
13100

If you do media or streaming Nvidia. More bang for your buck AMD. Ray tracing: Nvidia
In terms of value based on current pricing and performance including ray tracing:
4090 > 4080 > 7900XTX > 4070ti > 7900XT > 6950XT > 6650XT > 6600XT

I kind of hesitate recommended the 4080, 7900XTX, 4070ti, and 7900XT due to being poor values cost wise. But there are no other options in their performance tier that are commonly available.
 
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10tacle said:
I'm not so sure how much (if any) the Ukraine war is affecting CPU sales,
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It's mostly due to downstream macroeconomic effects. Several major markets for CPUs saw significant spikes in energy and commodity prices, as well as sudden economic uncertainty. It also caused cost increases for producers, due to severe shortages in specific inputs like helium.
 
hotaru251 said:
Yes, pandemic was best tiem for pc market (As a seller) but that comes at cost of short term (in yrs term) lower sales.
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InvalidError said:
In just about anything ever, an exceptional boom is usually followed by an equally exceptional crash that wipes out most of the excess and returns the average closer to the long-term trend. PC sales had been steadily declining for the last 10+ years prior to COVID and the "record sales decline" from the last year are offsetting excess sales from the two years of out-of-cycle COVID upgrades. This shouldn't be surprising anyone.
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I think there's a word for when you party too hard and then wake up feeling worse, the next morning... could we call it a hangover?
 
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Alvar "Miles" Udell said:
We're not exactly talking about 50%+ performance boosts from Bulldozer to Zen 1, we're talking about 15% give or take, nothing spectacular
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Uh, not quite. On compute workloads, AMD managed to deliver a ~45% generational improvement in multithreaded performance, between the 5950X and 7950X, without adding any extra cores!! That's a pretty astonishing achievement, in this day and age.
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I don't know how people seem to have missed it, except that Raptor Lake managed to eek out a win on gaming performance, and that's what most around here seem to care about. That, and the increase in TDP/PPT seems to have diverted a lot of attention, but you're still left with most of those gains, even if you restrict the 7950X to similar power consumption as its predecessor.
 
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So, the big question I have is whether there's anything expected in the latter half of this year that would provide an added kick to desktop sales. So far, we think there'll be a Raptor Lake refresh, which sounds pretty unexciting - maybe a little more cache, another 0.1 GHz or so... meh. Is there any chance of another AMD launch? I don't mean to sound spoiled, as the 7000 series is still pretty fresh and the X3D models haven't even landed... I'm just wondering.

The latest roadmap slide I can find is rather ambiguous about whether Zen 5 could arrive in 2023, but I'm guessing not?
 
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