AMD hit 46.06% CPU share on Steam in May, gaining 0.79 points in a single month and nearly three points since January, according to Valve's Hardware Survey. On Windows systems, the split sits at 55.02% Intel versus 44.97% AMD.
Five years ago that gap was 80-20. The trend line is unambiguous. But the Intel-versus-AMD story just got an expiration date.
Nvidia's RTX Spark announcement at Computex turned a two-horse race into a three-way brawl. The Arm-based superchip packs 20 CPU cores, a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, and 128GB of unified memory into thin Windows laptops.
Over 30 laptops and 10 desktops from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, and Microsoft ship this fall. Intel shares dropped 4.5% on the news.
AMD fell 1%. Nvidia closed up 6%.
AMD's executives responded with something between confidence and defiance. Senior vice president Rahul Tikoo told Tom's Hardware that Strix Halo already matches RTX Spark spec-for-spec, and pointed to Gorgon Halo, a Q3 refresh that bumps unified memory to 192 GB.
"Gorgon Halo, which is coming out in Q3, is going to be a better product," Tikoo said.
Chief software officer Andrej Zdravkovic went further. "At this point in time...I mean, you're just wrong if you don't get a Strix Halo notebook," he said, while arguing that the CUDA software moat has eroded enough that developers can switch platforms without pain.
Intel's posture is different. The company told Tom's Hardware it approaches Nvidia's PC entry with "a healthy dose of paranoia." Intel still commands a majority of Steam CPU share and benefits from decades of installed base, but it faces erosion on two fronts: AMD absorbing its gaming lead from below, and Nvidia attacking from the AI side above. The Steam numbers tell the AMD side of the story clearly. Ryzen X3D processors with 3D V-Cache technology have consistently led gaming benchmarks, and AMD keeps expanding the lineup. The company's EPYC server processors have pushed x86 server share toward the mid-40% range, with upcoming Venice architecture chips (2nm, 256-core Zen 6) entering production.
Nvidia is not waiting. The RTX Spark platform targets 1 petaflop of AI compute and handles 120-billion-parameter models locally.
Nvidia claims it is "the most efficient platform ever built" for Windows laptops. First devices arrive this fall, priced at the premium tier where Intel and AMD have historically dominated.
Both AMD and Intel are up sharply year to date despite the Computex selloff. AMD has gained 130% in 2026.
Intel has added nearly 200%. Those numbers reflect AI server demand, not PC dominance. The old question was whether AMD could catch Intel. The new question is whether catching Intel matters when the whole PC chip market is being rewritten.
