An AMD Athlon or Sempron chip may not drum as much excitement as Ryzen, but loyalty has helped those brands stick around for more than a decade.
An AMD Athlon or Sempron chip may not drum as much excitement as Ryzen, but loyalty has helped those brands stick around for more than a decade.
So what happens to those and other PC processors, like the A-series and FX, when AMD’s new Ryzen chips start flooding the market in March? AMD has said the first high-end desktop Ryzen chips will ship in March.
For now, AMD plans to make no changes to its lineup of existing chips, a company spokesman said.
Instead, the chips will be regrouped to focus on price-sensitive PC buyers.
Ryzen-based PCs are expected to be priced at a premium, competing with Intel’s top gaming CPUs. The FX chips will not go away once Ryzen arrives, and will be targeted toward budget gamers.
The A-series chips — which were targeted toward a wide range of laptops — will be much like Intel’s Core i3, i5 and Celeron and Pentium processors, which are also targeted at low-end to mid-range laptops and Chromebooks.
Unified AM4 socket compatibility helps maintain existing chips and has provided an easy path to Zen-based PC chip upgrade, the spokesman said. For example, the AM4 socket supports Zen chips and the recent 7th Generation A-series chips.
Expanding the PC chip lineup will help AMD compete with Intel, from the high-end to low end. AMD is already gaining in the PC market.
AMD took x86 chip market share from Intel in 2016. AMD had a 13.6 percent market share in 2016, growing from a 12.7 percent share in 2015. Intel’s share was 86.3 percent in 2016, dropping from 87.1 percent in 2015, according to Mercury Research.
Strong laptop chip shipments in the second half of 2016 and an inventory purge in 2015 helped AMD grow its market share, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.
