AMD Ryzen processors are racking up sales that could worry Intel

AMD Ryzen

Fresh figures have come to light which show that AMD’s Ryzen processors are continuing to sell at quite some speed, with one particular model making excellent headway, and worrying Intel’s most popular CPUs.

These statistics come from Mindfactory.de (as spotted by Wccftech.com), a German retailer which has spilled the beans on processor sales before, and this time it has revealed stats on historical sales of AMD and Intel CPUs to date.

The best performer for AMD is the Ryzen 5 1600, which is the seventh bestselling processor of all-time (Intel holds the top six spots). The Ryzen 5 1600 is a six-core (12-thread) CPU which can boost to 3.6GHz out-of-the-box, and can now be had for around $160 (or about £145 in the UK) following price cuts after the launch of Ryzen 2nd Generation chips.

This temptingly-priced processor has sold approaching 25,000 units at Mindfactory.de in just over a year since its launch, nudging past AMD’s previous bestseller CPU, the FX-8350, which has sold only slightly less. However, the difference is that the FX-8350 was released seven years ago, and only shifted 12,000 units in its first year on sale.

The Ryzen 5 1600 has managed around double that in its first year, which is pretty impressive to say the least. The 1600X variant is also doing well, and makes the top 20 table for the bestselling CPUs as seen below.

Mindfactory.de CPU sales

Source: Mindfactory.de via Wccftech.com (compiled by reddit.com\user\ingebor)

Intel top dogs

Of course, as mentioned, Intel still dominates the very top processors, with the six bestselling models. Its Core i7-6700K is by far the most prolific seller, shifting just over 50,000 units since launch. However, that’s a Skylake chip which was released towards the end of 2015, so it has been on sale considerably longer than the Ryzen 5 1600.

At this point, we need to give ourselves a reality check, and remember that this isn’t a picture of the overall processor market. Far from it: obviously this is just a small sample – a sample of one single retailer in fact – so you can’t go putting too much stock in the stats.

That said, the figures do give us some interesting clues as to how Ryzen is performing, and it seems that AMD is continuing to make good ground. Particularly when you consider the previous figures from this German retailer which showed that in August last year, AMD’s overall processor sales actually outstripped Intel (accounting for 56% of sales).

That backed up what AMD’s CEO Lisa Su claimed in October last year when the company revealed its Q3 financials – namely that Ryzen desktop processors represented around 40 to 50% of sales at some online retailers (although she didn’t specify which outlets, it’s a fair bet Mindfactory.de was one of them).

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).